Allegheny County executive election puts environmental decisions up in the air

The potential sale of Pittsburgh’s legacy steelmaker and the possibility of a federal hydrogen hub coming to Allegheny County ensure that change is coming to the region’s energy, manufacturing and environmental sectors. And this November, voters will choose a new Allegheny County executive to steer the government into a new era.

Democratic nominee Sara Innamorato said she wants to promote the growth of clean manufacturing jobs while taking a hard line on pollution enforcement, and she opposes new fracking and a non-renewable hydrogen hub.

Republican nominee Joe Rockey downplayed the role of local industry in air quality issues and stressed the need to streamline permitting to promote industry growth — and he signaled a green light to new fracking and the hydrogen hub that many local leaders have already endorsed.

The shadow of steel

The candidates’ differences are clearly on display in how they suggest the county should interact with U.S. Steel. The legendary Pittsburgh-based manufacturer looms large over county politics despite employing fewer than 4,000 people in the region these days.

Sara Innamorato at a press conference in Sept. 2023. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)

Innamorato urged working with industry and aiming to keep manufacturing jobs in the region, while maintaining a hard line on environmental standards and community agreements.

“I believe that in a strong economy, a portion of that needs to be manufacturing,” Innamorato said. “But those industrial partners, those corporations, they need to be good partners with their host community. That means that we are setting clear and rigid standards that protect public health and the environment.”

She said she would invest in additional personnel and training for the county’s pollution control division to pursue greater enforcement of the federal Clean Air Act.

Rockey said he would hold companies accountable to existing pollution laws, “but we should not, as a county, be fighting jobs and attempting to get rid of them.”

Both candidates independently brought up U.S. Steel’s 2022 decision to invest in a new modern steelmaking plant in Arkansas and its tangential decisions to cancel upgrades to the Mon Valley Works plant and decrease production at the Clairton Coke Works.

Both saw the moves as a loss for the region — the new Arkansas facility uses more sustainable steelmaking methods than existing Mon Valley plants — but placed blame in different places. 

Rockey faulted the county Health Department, saying long permitting delays for planned upgrades to U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson plant led them to look elsewhere. The company itself said their priorities changed during a two-year permitting wait.

“The time it takes for us … to get a yes or a no to a development opportunity needs to be shrunk in order for us to be able to get companies to be interested in putting their operations in Allegheny County,” Rockey said.

Innamorato said she thinks the company looked to Arkansas because of the state’s “right to work” law that enabled the company’s operations there to use non-union workers, unlike in Western Pennsylvania, where the company’s plants are unionized.

 

“That’s a decision that U.S. Steel made, because they decided not to care for their people who actually deliver them profits,” Innamorato said. “They chose their profits over their own people who manufacture and make the products that make them money globally.”

She said, too, that she would work to speed up permitting, in part by filling open positions in the county bureaucracy. “So we’re not being obstructionists,” she said. “What we want to be is a partner in this.”