Aliquippa mayor Dwan Walker touts $3 million investment as major step in rebuilding Aliquippa

•Development of a partnership with the Salvation Army to provide food bank and emergency food assistance programs to meet the basic needs of 500 low-income residents; and
•The demolition of three remaining commercial buildings adjacent to PA Route 51 and the entrance to the Aliquippa Industrial Park.
“Three million dollars may not sound like much, but to a city like ours it’s a big deal, it’s important,” he said. “The first thing it will allow us to do is address our biggest problem—blight. We have 800 dilapidated properties in the city—we don’t have the money to take them all down. We need to do, not just one or two, but 40, 50 at a clip. Investors don’t want to pay for that, but if we take down the properties, clean them up, that meets the developers half-way.”
The other initiatives are aimed at creating long-term educational and career opportunities for the residents, especially young African Americans, who haven’t had those options since the U.S. Steel mill closed in the 1980s. With the Shell ethane cracker plant under construction just 15 miles away, those opportunities are coming back.
But one problem was physically getting people to the Community College of Beaver County or the Franklin Center, or CareerLinks or the Beaver Valley Mall for the chemical plant-related training programs they have made available.
“The programs for the library—record expungement so they can get jobs, training—we have eliminated the excuse of ‘we can’t get there.’ We’re bringing it to the library. Anybody within 4.4 square miles, everybody comes Downtown for a bus or something, one way or another. So, you can get to the library, you can get to the Salvation Army, and you can get to Beaver County CareerLinks because guess what—they’re in the library now.”
Walker said he’s already looking to maximize the clout the funding can have by leveraging it to qualify for matching grants and other funding streams.
“People (ask), ‘what are you gonna do with the money?’ Well, I’m going to help you—but you have to be a willing participant. You have to come to where the resources are. We’re doing something everybody told us we couldn’t do—people in the room at the time said we couldn’t do it. Now we just have to dot our ‘I’s and cross our ‘T’s. I like the state being on us. I like the challenge of accountability. I hope the people of Aliquippa like it, too.”
 
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