Letter to the editor: Take care of communities first

The op-ed “Opening the door to people-based economic development in Western Pennsylvania” (Nov 20, TribLive) hit the nail on the head. We should focus on the well-being of our communities rather than the false promise of new jobs from big business. Let’s not court big corporations like Amazon, with a poor track record of environmental and worker concern, who vacuum up the wealth of an area and funnel it to their out-of-state headquarters. Then, when the wealth is all gone and they have a more lucrative offer elsewhere, they pack up and leave us to clean up their mess.

Instead let’s focus on developing good-paying jobs that go to local people with companies invested in improving our communities and who keep the profits locally. One such idea is to help our local electric utility convert from a centralized grid with increasingly expensive and unreliable power plants to a decentralized one by putting its power source in customers’ homes with television-size storage batteries. The electric company employees will be the first to be retrained in green energy jobs. These are good-paying jobs of the future in an industry that improves the environment and the community’s quality of life, instead of low wage work that becomes obsolete in 10 years.

We should ask our local officials to improve our environment, our quality of life and our economy by going green.

Michael Garing

North Huntingdon