On Thursday February 22nd County Executive Phillips Armstrong delivered his State of the County Address at Coca-Cola Park. Here is the entire state of the county address outlining keys to continued growth and success here in the Lehigh Valley.
“Thank you to all of you for being here today for my first State of the County address. When I decided to run for County Executive, I started a yearlong process that has been a lot of fun, rewarding and at times, challenging.
Then I won the election and found that serving as County Executive was even more challenging than running for the job. I think it will also turn out to be as much fun and just as rewarding.
There is a lot of compromise in politics, and in government. This address is a great example. Under Lehigh County’s Home Rule Charter, I am obligated to deliver an address that outlines the state of the county, but I am going to compromise and do it my way. Instead of a 7:30 breakfast and coffee, we thought you might prefer a happy hour and better drinks!
Before we start, I like to take a moment to recognize some of the people that make serving as your county executive such an honor and privilege.
First, I would like to recognize my partners in moving Lehigh County forward, the Board of Commissioners. I look forward to working with all of you, and my greatest hope is that we can set aside the divisions of years past and work together as truly coequal branches of government. I hope that this “Progress over Politics” approach is one that we can all buy into, and that it produces results for the residents of Lehigh County.
In addition, I would like to recognize our third co-equal branch of government, the Judiciary. We have our Judges in the Court of Common Pleas, headed by President Judge Reibman as well as the Magisterial District Judges and all of the people who work in Lehigh County’s Judiciary.
Also, my fellow executive branch elected officials deserve mention. The District Attorney Jim Martin, Sheriff Joe Hanna, Coroner Scott Grim, Clerk of Judicial Records Andrea Naugle and County Controller Glenn Eckhart. All of them work hard to make this county great.
Finally, our employees deserve recognition. When I took the oath of office, I was pleasantly surprised by the caliber of employee that sets the standard here. I quickly became aware that high standards, conscientiousness and a strong work ethic is a constant across all of our departments, whether the employee reports up through the County Executive or through some of our other elected officials.
I would like to take a moment to mention our executive leadership team, some of whom may be familiar to you but others are new. I will ask them to please stand up when I call their name, so that you can see who they are. Ed Hozza, Director of Administration; Sara Murray, Solicitor; Frank Kane, Director of Community and Economic Development; Rick Molchany, Director of General Services, Kay Achenbach, Director of Human Services and Joe Shadid on the staff of Good Shepherd Hospital is our Director of Cedarbrook.
I hope that you will all come to know what I already know– Lehigh County couldn’t ask for a better team. Lehigh County’s taxpayers could not ask for a better team of department heads, supervisors and employees. We are fortunate to have such great people who choose to serve the county. I want them all know that their service never goes unnoticed or unappreciated by me. It would be impossible to deliver high quality services while keeping costs down for Lehigh County’s taxpayers without these employees.
What a great venue we have here in Coca Cola Park. I would like to thank Kurt Landis, the IronPigs general manager, for hosting us today. I would also like to thank LVEDC and Don Cunningham for working hard to find sponsors and create this this incredible event. I have done a few of these events and its really a lot of work that is not easy, yet they make it look like it just happened naturally.
I am here as your County Executive to tell you about the state of Lehigh County. But in many ways, I still feel like an outsider. I think that’s a good thing, two months into my term.
Since I took office, I have spent hours and hours looking at things in the county with a fresh set of eyes, poring over our contracts and business practices and trying to discern just exactly why we do the things that we do, and if there are ways that we might do them better.
I can tell you that after thorough review by this newcomer, the state of this county is very strong and we all benefit from the wisdom of previous county executives, boards of commissioners and row officers, who planned wisely, spent frugally and fulfilled their duties as good stewards of our taxpayers’ money.
One of my first actions as County Executive was to sign an administrative notice prohibiting discrimination on the basis of someone’s gender identity because I believe that everyone deserves a fair chance to be themselves. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, we should judge a person by the quality of their character and not by their choice of gender or who they choose to love.
In a moment, I will talk about economic development, but you should know that I believe that a strong economy means that EVERYONE benefits. EVERYONE who wants a job should be able to find one and it’s our job to help people who need help to develop the skills that employers want. I do not believe that we should measure our local economy only by what happens at the top.
I am a strong believer in efforts to make homes affordable to working class people. I believe that people who come to us through our county intake seeking help for drug and alcohol addiction should have it. I think that part of our county’s charm is its quality of life with diverse recreational activities and strong neighborhoods where families still know their neighbors.
People want to work and live in a place where there are diverse cultures, good restaurants, performing arts, walking trails, sports teams — we have it all here in Lehigh County.
We are home to a wonderful Zoo at the Trexler Nature Preserve and a world class Olympic bicycling facility at the Valley Preferred Cycling Center, which we all still refer to as the Velodrome.
I would like everyone to take a moment to just look around. Look at where we are today. Coca Cola Park is more than just a ball park, it’s more than just a place where fans gather in the summer… it’s a symbol. It’s an example of what happens when a community rallies around something that they have in common.
Lehigh County built this ballpark with little more than a promise from a fledgling team that wasn’t even named yet. And now, ten years later, we stand in one of the most popular minor league ballparks in America. In 2016, Forbes Magazine recognized the IronPigs as the fourth most valuable minor league team in America.
None of the happened by accident. It’s an example of what can happen in a great public-private partnership.
People from far away know Coca Cola park. It is a symbol that represents the Lehigh Valley. Lehigh County took this massive project from a brownfield to a beacon of hope for our region. It’s our story. It’s Lehigh County’s story.
Over the past several years, our local economy has undergone a renaissance. No more are we dependent on industrial age manufacturing, but, as they like to say at LVEDC, we still make stuff here.
Together with Northampton County, our Gross Domestic Product is the 65th largest in America, and our economy is bigger than the economies of 108 countries. Manufacturing is still our number one industry as measured by GDP, but it’s different than in years past. Rather than taking place in the foundries and mills of the 1800’s, our manufacturing today takes place in much smaller but more technical facilities. We produce plastic products, craft beers, medical devices, pharmaceuticals and almost anything you can imagine.
A lot of places in the country have not adapted economically as well as we have. As I think about what we have accomplished in Lehigh County, I am struck by today’s economic reality.
Right now, growth and economic development are becoming concentrated and clustered. Half of all new businesses established between 2010 and 2014 were established in just 20 large urban counties nationwide. That’s less than one percent of the counties in the US….and we aren’t one of them.
We have to work harder and struggle for every new employer that we gain.
New technologies and industries are disrupting once reliable business models and forcing companies and consumers to change their behavior. Just look at the explosion of online retail that comes at the cost of America’s shopping malls closing down.
Many of the jobs of the future will require an entirely new set of hard and soft skills, and a significant amount of specialized training.
We have to work to make our economy innovative and creative and to help it grow organically.
This is the world that we face, it is one that is extremely competitive, international in its nature and it’s not slowing down for anyone.
So how will Lehigh County adapt and respond?
Part of the answer is what has already been done.
We are already participating in the online retail economy… companies like Amazon.com and, just across our borders, ZuLilly, are employing hundreds of our residents.
We know that the majority of new jobs will be in health-related area. We are fortunate to be the home of three major health networks: LVHN, St. Luke’s University Health Network and Coordinated Health which, together, are our largest employers.
We need to make sure that we as a region have a comprehensive economic development strategy in place. We need to collaborate with our private sector partners to promote balanced growth and appropriate workforce training to ensure that when businesses choose to locate here, they will find a workforce with the skills that they need.
As a county, we must ensure that we provide a qualified pool of workers that businesses can count on for expansion. We will build on the great relationships that we already have with groups like the Workforce Investment Board, LVEDC, school districts, business, the Building Trades, local community colleges and technical institutes and our training centers in order to create new generations of well-trained and motivated workers.
I think the carpenter training center in Allentown is a great example of how we can modernize the way we approach education and provide people with a way to the middle class. Those jobs pay well, have good benefits and make sure we can continue to grow our county. We have to replicate these models to other high tech and middle skilled professions. It will require commitments from both the public and private sector but the benefit is a stronger county.
As a county, we’ve got to be active partners in incentivizing and encouraging business growth by fostering investment and working as a catalyst for entrepreneurship.
Our future depends on brining everyone together to come up with new strategies to grow our economy.
But it’s also important that we preserve one of our greatest treasures— farmland. Lehigh County ranks fifth in Pennsylvania by number of acres preserved, and we are on track to preserve our three-hundredth farm this year.
I firmly believe that one area where the county can do better and will do better is helping our smaller boroughs and townships to access grants and resources. I have had so many meetings with state officials and the amount of money that our boroughs and townships are losing out on is staggering.
That’s why I think the county needs a position specially designed to help our townships procure grants and state assistance. While growth in Allentown has been positive and beneficial, we must grow as a county as a whole for it to be sustainable.
This is a strategy that is good for growth, good for our residents and good for our businesses.
Next, we have to provide quality infrastructure. The news from the Trump Administration in Washington is that the burden of new Federal and State roadway infrastructure projects will fall to state and local governments. I’m going to borrow from my sports days, the ball is in our court.
The county has a great revenue option at its disposal. I believe we need to reintroduce the $5 vehicle fee so that we can be a source of support for our cities and boroughs. As we continue to grow expand from new houses to warehouses, we need the bridges and roads to ensure that goods and services can move around.
If we do not provide quality infrastructure, we make it harder to make our case to new businesses and difficult to attract new residents.
But it’s not all just about economic development. Right now, in Lehigh County and in America, we are facing a serious public health crisis.
Our high schools, and even our middle schools, are rocked with almost daily news of young people in the prime of their lives lost to opioids. As a former teacher, it pains me to watch the loss of our young people to this crisis.
I focus on the crisis in our schools first because the greatest tragedy any community can ever experience is the loss of a child, but the opioid epidemic does not discriminate. Men and women of all ages are being hit hard by this disease.
In order for Lehigh County to do its part to combat the opioid epidemic, I would like to expand the CTC network countywide.
CTC is short for “Communities That Care.” It’s a nationwide network that combines the efforts of school districts, government and community leaders and focuses it all in the same direction.
The program has received nationwide recognition and achieved some significant results. In a randomized, controlled trial, twenty-four communities across seven states, students from CTC communities were twenty-five percent less likely to have initiated delinquent behavior, thirty–two percent less likely to have tried alcohol, and thirty-three percent less likely to have tried cigarettes.
In Whitehall, we experienced similar results and we have with us today Denise Continenza if you have any questions about how successful the CTC initiative is locally.
I won’t go on any longer. Even with an open bar, I know I can tire you out after about fifteen or twenty minutes. Just please know that I am so very humbled that the voters trusted me to manage our county over the next four years.
I hope that you will find that your trust has not been misplaced and that my door is always open to you, the residents of Lehigh County. And to those who are newer to our county, we want to make sure that we tell every worker, every business and every culture that YOU ARE WELCOME HERE.
Thank you.”
Information provided to TVL by:
Jill Orosky
Executive Assistant to the County Executive
County of Lehigh, Office of the County Executive
17 S. 7th Street, 4th Floor, Suite 436
Allentown, PA 18101
www.lehighcounty.org
