Bill moves forward to rename section of Route 981 in honor of late Rep. Reese of Mt. Pleasant Township

The state House transportation committee approved a bill to name a 3½-mile section of Route 981 from the intersection of Route 819 to Route 2021 south of Norvelt after the late state Rep. Mike Reese of Mt. Pleasant Township.

Rep. Ryan Warner, R-Connellsville, the prime sponsor of the bill, said Tuesday he was carrying out the initiative of thousands of his constituents who have signed a petition requesting the road in Mt. Pleasant Township be named the “Honorable Mike Reese Memorial Highway.”

“The support of the people who he served, and those of us who had the privilege of serving with him, speaks volumes about the kind of man he was,” Warner said in a statement.

This is the first step in the process to adopt legislation to rename the roadway. The bill will be placed for a vote before the full House.

Reese, who represented the 59th District covering the Mt. Pleasant and Unity townships areas from 2009 to 2021, died Jan. 2 of a brain aneurysm. The 42-year-old Reese had been reelected in November.

The online petition that Nick Molitor of Mt. Pleasant created on Change.org to rename a section of the rural road after Reese garnered 2,434 supporters as of Tuesday afternoon. It is close to its goal of 2,500 signatures.

Molitor could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Molitor previously said he never met Reese but corresponded with him several times and appreciated the work he did representing the 59th Legislative District.

“Every day when I go to work, I pass his office, and I see all these posters in people’s yards that say ‘Mike Reese you’ll be missed,’” Molitor said.

He said in his posting of the petition he was inspired to ask the state to rename a section of Route 981, which runs through Reese’s district, because the state named Toll Route 66 the Amos K. Hutchinson Bypass, which goes from New Stanton to Delmont.

Hutchinson, a Greensburg-area state House representative in the 1970s and 1980s, was a longtime proponent of a four-lane highway that would remove truck traffic between the Pennsylvania Turnpike at New Stanton and Route 22 at Delmont, away from Route 66 which cuts through the center of Greensburg and connects to Route 22.