Bob Casey Holds Town Hall To Promote Infrastructure Investments In Pennsylvania
i wanted to dramatically uh dramatically take the mask off because this don this is a pennsylvania mask it was made during the pandemic but i don't know if there's a lehigh valley reference on here so i better put in my pocket there's something about the liberty bell there and i see valley forge and punxsutawney phil have to get a new version but don thanks so much for being here and for acting as rmc this is our seventh uh town hall or i should say drive-in town hall since the spring and we will be doing at least one more next month but we wanted to do these town halls to be able to come out and talk about the work we're doing in washington i know that's not the only work that's being done in government and in communities like like allentown the lehigh valley but we're grateful for the opportunity we're grateful that people are willing to come out and every gathering like this needs an emcee a moderator someone who can help us and don we're grateful for that don as you might remember had a distinguished career of public service to the people of this region both in the city of bethlehem as a member of city council as as mayor as county as county executive and now leading uh one of the most dynamic successful economic development organizations in the whole country uh preparing this region and the the the companies in this region and the workers in this region for a bright future so we're grateful he's willing to spend some of his summer with us on an evening like tonight so i want to thank him for that and for his leadership i wanted to make a couple go ahead give donna a hand and i see over here on my left dr mead the president of uh cedar crest and we're grateful to be here on this campus this great institution we're just talking backstage about the graduates who uh spend their time here as undergraduates and then go on to serve this community and so many other communities we we spoke about a number of of different disciplines and areas of study but we were talking towards the end of our conversation about nurses and the nursing students that come through this great institution of higher education i know we have always appreciated the the mission and ministry of a nurse but probably ever more so in the grip of in the aftermath what we hope will soon be the aftermath of the pandemic because of all they contributed all of the public health and healthcare professionals who helped us get through this long dark chapter i know we got a ways to go it's one of the reasons this event is in is a drive-in event and not not the event that we had hoped for a month or a month and a half ago but we'll get to that we'll get to that later just wanted to highlight some of the areas we're working on in terms of policy in washington i'm holding in my hand just copies of some handouts that i think many of you might have tonight one is this it just says an infrastructure investment and jobs act that's the bill that you heard so much about i won't go through all of it i won't even highlight all the pennsylvania numbers in it but it's significant because it is uh the kind of investment in physical infrastructure that our country has never undertaken before and when i say never i mean never just get to give you a sense of what it's going to mean for the people of pennsylvania at last count in our state you look at it statewide but even if you're just focused on lehigh county the lehigh valley this region overall just consider one category bridges at last count the state of pennsylvania had 3353 bridges that are in poor condition now poor condition doesn't mean that bridge is going to collapse next wednesday we hope to god it won't but it means over time you're going to be putting communities at risk and economic growth at risk if you don't fix basic infrastructure like a bridge among among many others covered by the bill this legislation just for pennsylvania will add to what the state is already doing over the last decade or almost a decade on bridge repair and replacement add another 1.6 billion dollars and there's other bridge money the state can apply for but we know that it'll be guaranteed that 1.6 i could talk about the highway money and the transit money the broadband investment still so many communities throughout the state even here in the lehigh valley where it is more a little more urban maybe than the middle of the state or northwestern pennsylvania but a lot of communities still don't have broadband kids can't do their homework businesses can't grow if they don't have access to high-speed internet so this infrastructure bill which kind of went by people pretty quickly will make a tremendous investment in our in our home state of pennsylvania last point i'll make about this is another piece of paper you have here this just says at the top how pennsylvania benefits from the so-called better care better jobs bill just happens to be my bill so i'm bragging about a little bit but this bill is is simple in its in its concept but profound in its impact on the lives of pennsylvanians we're talking about and this is legislation we're about to work on in september to finally make investments that will allow seniors to get home care who can't get it now because they're they haven't been given a waiver under the federal law and people with disabilities to get home care or care in the community it goes by the broad headline home community based services by the acronym hcbs those home and community-based services are vital for americans it's the choice they want to make in terms of the care they hope to receive they should not have only one choice which is institutional care or congregate care often to shorthand it as nursing home care they should have that option as americans to get the care they want in the place that they want and so that they and their families can can have that kind of benefit the workforce that does this noble heroic and essential work should be paid more they're only paid 12 an hour throughout the nation we cannot say that we're the strongest country in the world the best country in the world when we're not investing enough in home and a services so this handout tells us about the impact on pennsylvania jobs and the services that will be provided lots of jobs to be created family caregivers to work because someone who's helping them care for a loved one whether that loved one is a senior citizen or whether that loved one is a child with a disability who needs help or whether it's an adult with a disability so we might be talking more about that tonight finally i want to say this one of the the best things we did in the last couple of months in washington franklin one of the best things we did in years was to come together to make investments through the rescue plan for schools for vaccinations we need that money now more than ever to get the vaccination number up and also to invest in people to invest in tax cuts for families raising children for example but in addition to that we made investments as well in communities and just think about it this way in lehigh county alone 152 million available through the through county government to help the entire county and then when you add the dollars for other communities it's over 150 million as i mentioned northampton county was a little less because it's a smaller population county but they got 139 million dollars you should have the resources at the local level not just to deal with with the pandemic and to deal with all of the challenges that challenges that come with it but you should also have the resources to be able to save small businesses as as some county governments are using their resources to do just that so we got a lot more to do a lot more work to do and i know a lot of families are still suffering but we're going to do everything we can to try to meet those challenges in the in the next two months especially as we work on new legislation but we'll get to those issues and others tonight so let's take our first question thank you senator um do you mind saying your name only because sometimes with math say i live in kutztown and this is my question how will the senate protect and expand voting rights and prevent racial and partisan gerrymandering in the current redistricting it's a great question because we're confronted with a challenge the likes of which i'm not sure any of us would have thought would be right ahead of us just a few years ago there are efforts made now in state after state some 400 bills now to change voting so i believe as a as a member of the united states senate i've got to do two things to do everything i can to stop those bills from becoming law or having the effect that i think they will have on voting in america all across the country but secondly and probably more importantly in terms of what i can do is to vote the right way we have at least one or two big opportunities coming up i'd say two the first one may be more difficult the second one i think we can we can actually make more progress on the first is senate bill one it's called for the people it it deals with some of these voting issues directly to prevent some of the voter suppression that's contained in those state legislative efforts across so many states those 400 bills but it also has provisions in it to deal with so-called dark money the the corporate uh influence that uh has been brought to bear through um through elections through dark money where you don't know where the money's coming from when you're seeing attack ads launch against a candidate or or on an issue so it will bring scrutiny and transparency to those those expenditures and the third part of the bill is about ethics stronger ethics for members of congress stronger ethics ethics for the president of the united states and a stronger code of ethics and rules and requirements for supreme court justices i think probably the more likely scenario is the the voting rights elements of that bill and other voting rights provisions will be contained in a separate bill which we can vote on this fall we already had one one vote on it actually another vote just before we left last week but we now know that we have 50 democrats meaning every democrat in the senate willing to support a voting rights bill that's already been tested we can't get the support of the other side yet i hope when they're home for the next couple weeks they might think again about protecting voting rights nothing is more fundamental nothing is more foundational for our democracy than making sure that people have not just the right to vote and that that vote is protected but that they should have the option to vote in the way that's best for them if that means they vote on election day fine if that means they vote by mail early that's fine we saw what happened last time when we had the worst pandemic in american history in a tough economy we still got the highest turnout ever for a presidential race because there were more options to vote in place like in a state like pennsylvania because we were ready for the the pandemic so we got to make sure that people not only have the right to vote but to be able to vote in the setting and in the manner that they would choose but thanks for the question becky bradley our executive director of the lehigh planning commission valley planning commission good it's it's good to see you and thank you for being in the lehigh valley first i want to thank you for your leadership on the recent infrastructure and also the climate uh bills both are groundbreaking and it's apparent that these pieces of legislation really don't function in isolation they actually work to together and reinforce and grow our economy help improve our national security and support a resilient future your appearance today is just a few miles away from riverside drive the delaware and lehigh national heritage corridor and 9 11 memorial trail project in addition to a commuter connector walking rolling biking path the project will open new emergency services routes support lanta's bus rapid transit line create thousands of jobs and connect the region's largest equity community to employment centers while remediating brownfields and protecting the lehigh river so it demonstrates all of those key objectives that are in the bills that you've helped move through um and are moving through the senate we've applied as a lehigh valley for the last five years for discretionary funding from usdot every year that money goes to philly in pittsburgh would you help us bring it back here is your first name bradley becky becky becky i'm sorry well becky um uh i know you were the questioner but did you get any nudge from don cunningham to ask that question nope i did not know she was but we're supporting it no we'll we'll try to be as helpful as we can i don't know enough about it that project and the the particulars of it but i'll make sure that we spend some time on it because these are the kind of projects and the kind of investments that we can make not only for one community and not only for one objective which is to improve the quality of life to uh to bring about more more equity to you know one of the one of the outgrowths of the of the um now national international effort to confront climate change and protect god's creation our planet uh one of the outgrowths of that has been a recognition that there are communities that have been left out environmental justice is one of the ways to describe what's what's happened where so many communities usually low-income communities and often communities that are both low-income and communities of color have not had the kind of investment to keep their air clean to keep the water and the the infrastructure in their communities at a level that that any of us would would expect as americans and too often whether it's whether it's been lead in water or lead in houses or pollution or lack of transportation options or so many other challenges i think the climate the challenge presented by climate change has caused us to focus on the inequities in so many of those communities so i'd like to spend more time uh with your team get ways that we can be helpful and conor see right behind you connor works in this region and conor can can work with you and uh senator this is josh siegel who's a member of allentown city council earlier man josh like becky bradley i do want to thank you for coming back to the lehigh valley and as always it's a pleasure to have you here in the city of allentown uh my question relates to and i want to thank you first obviously for your steadfast leadership both on the bipartisan infrastructure bill but more importantly the 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation bill that's making its way through both the senate and the house you know obviously the reconciliation bill emphasizes not just the physical infrastructure but more importantly as we spoke about sort of the human infrastructure that we've neglected in this country for so long and my question pertains to health care which i think the covet epidemic has laid bare as perhaps the most vital human infrastructure that we could perhaps possibly invest in um i want to know what you will do in the united states senate to either fight to lower the age of medicare eligibility so that more people can get access to quality affordable health insurance make medicare more accessible perhaps even to public employees in the city of allentown i can say as a municipal official our fastest growing expense by and large is healthcare which absorbs vital public services that could otherwise be invested back into the community in terms of housing social welfare education and beyond that will you support a gradual transition or overall transition to a medicare for all single-pare health care system so that every american in this country can get access to the most vital human right and human infrastructure which is healthcare well councilman i want to thank you for first of all your service i don't have to say to don cunningham how brave you have to be to serve on any city council right but we're we're grateful for the question because in this next initiative as you outlined uh there are going to be major component parts of this bill that focus on areas that we used to think was significant and substantial just for one one piece of legislation let alone a piece of legislation that one focused on on health care a huge investment to to meet the climate change challenge i mentioned home and community-based services pre-kindergarten education quality affordable child care it's basically a a strategy to lower costs for families and to help families get to work and to be able to to grow and and obviously as well to create a lot of jobs as we're confronting uh the challenge of climate change on the health care front itself if you just pulled out the the segments of this uh proposal and it's still um we have some broad definitions from the budget resolution but now we're into the second part we're actually actually writing the policy and focusing on revenues and pay for us because unlike the 2017 tax bill when the other side had the majority they didn't pay for that bill we're going to try to pay for as much as this legislation as possible so if you just pull out the the the health care provisions for examination or or talk about the issue more generally one of the newer features of this which actually was not in president biden's original proposal the so-called families plan way back for when he announced the family's plan there's a new proposal led by senator sanders actually i had the original bill on this which was to expand medicare in terms of of hearing dental and vision we've never had those those services and those provisions covered now we can if we can get this this major piece of legislation passed so that would be a substantial expansion of the benefits under medicare secondly we also have an opportunity to continue some of the the improvements to health care that were made in the rescue plan the the the benefits in the rescue plan to those who were served by affordable care act exchanges and and had benefit from the affordable care act the the the changes in the rescue plan were substantial but it didn't get a lot of attention because people were focused on the rescue plan had 1400 checks and a couple of other provisions which got a lot of attention so i think we can build upon and grow the advancements we made in the in in the rescue plan i also think that when you made reference to medicare allowing people to to enroll in medicare at a younger age or to buy into medicare at a younger age i've always supported a proposal that's been around for a number of years uh for medicare at 50. um that's that i'm not certain that will be in this bill but that's certainly been part of the debate and in terms of what we do for health care overall the one i'd say two big questions i have when when folks say what about medicare for all i have two big questions at least maybe more but at least two big ones what happens to the children's health insurance program and what happens to the medicaid program both are vital in terms of children's health insurance and i haven't gotten the answers to those questions that are satisfactory to me but they're vitally important now i think when we talk about expanding health care what what probably won't be in this bill but i'd like to see enacted in the law someday is to make it very clear that even though we've made great progress on children's health insurance with the children's health insurance program with medic medicaid for some children and other ways to get health care we still have not reduced to zero the number of children uh not who are not covered by uh health care we still have health insurance we still have four million american children who have no health care at all and i think that's a national embarrassment and it's hurting our national security it's hurting our economic security and it's hurting our the skill of our workforce ultimately uh like a lot of a lot of children's issues have an impact i believe that any child born in a hospital in the united states of america should automatically be enrolled in medicaid if the parent or caregiver wants to opt out fine they can opt out but why don't we just make it clear that as soon as a child is born they they are covered by health care so they can get early periodic screening and diagnostic testing services so they can get well child visits so they can get the early care that they need to develop so that's something we probably won't get to in this bill but it's another way i think we can expand existing programs one of the more successful things we ever did recently was expand medicaid it helped us grow the number of people with coverage and it also helped us directly with the uh with the opioid crisis we've got tens of thousands at one point seventy thousand pennsylvanians getting treatment for a substance use disorder problem like the opioid addiction problem they only got those services because they had medicaid expansion one of the best things we ever did but thanks councilman for your laser focus on health care well thank you and we have our next question we could just please uh give us your name and where you live sure i'm carmen bell here resident city of allentown i want to thank the senator for all he's done to support and strengthen our community for all he's done to help our older adults and but today my question is focused on younger people i'm concerned about covet 19 and the delta variant and the fact that children under the age of 12 are not yet able to be vaccinated school is about to start in about three or four weeks and i'm wondering when that vaccination is going to be available for children under the age of 12. well
carmen thanks and the worry you have about children under the age of 12 is a worry that so many americans share i cannot tell you when that will happen because i don't run the fda and we want to make sure that the fda has a continues to have a process which is thorough and and uh rigorous so that we can get we can achieve both safety and and effectiveness or efficacy as they sometimes use the word that's what the fda does well when we had the the emergency use authorization determination made by the fda on various vaccines that's the highest level of scrutiny and review in the world there's no standard higher than that now we're hoping that the the ultimate uh authorization comes from the fda that goes beyond emergency use authorization but that's a that's a pretty high bar to get to that's why we have over 160 million americans that are vaccinated they have to make a separate determination as it relates to children under the age of 12. it may be that they they go below 12 but stop um stop short in the early years of a of a child's life i don't know where that line will be but we'll have to have to see what the fda does but it's really up to them now we we in the senate and the house we provide oversight of the fda but we obviously can't interfere with their process so i'm hoping it's going to be much sooner rather than later on both fronts both the the uh the full authorization for the vaccines that are that are out there but also finally have a determination made as it relates to um to to young children but i think the the best thing we can do i think in those contexts is to do everything we can to take the steps necessary to keep children safe and in schools and i know a lot of school districts are wrestling with that right now thanks carmen thank you next question good afternoon senator justin parker fields i just want to thank you and your team for putting pennsylvanians first and you know all the hard work that you guys are doing um this pandemic has had crippling effects for working families and individuals who are having a hard time deciding if they're going to put their dollars towards a bill rent or food on the table eviction moratoriums have become the figurative boogeyman in the headlines as of recent which turns into a match scramble for trying to find assistance what is the game plan for working families and individuals but also importantly marginalized communities such as the buy pack lgbtqia plus and unsheltered ones to ensure that they get the needed assistance to pay their rent and maintain jobs that will pay them a fair wage to remain in their homes justin thanks so much your your question raises uh a lot of issues all in one i think what what we should try to do at least this is my view of what we should do going forward in terms of what the federal government can do by way of the the legislative and executive branches is to try to continue a lot of the strategies that were put in place to a certain extent as far back as the cares act that was passed in late march of 2020 and then there were succeeding bills throughout the course of the year which added to the cares act then ultimately had a december covid bill and then we got into 2021 and we had to do the rescue plan on on our own in the on with democrats but what you see with a lot of those um provisions of those uh bills is to try to meet people where they are to say to try to ask yourself or really engage with people what do you need to get to get through what do you need to pay your bills what do you need to to go forward so now we're coming towards the the end of a of another chapter where you may not have the same supports in place that you had during uh during the the uh the 2020 and early 21 period but you're all but but you want to maintain the kind of support that allows families to make ends meet you mentioned families that have trouble just just paying the bills right um that's why the the the child tax credit extension is so critically important for families because they a lot of families now are able to benefit they did in the month of july they benefited in august and throughout the rest of the year with those child tax credit payments other families will start to benefit as well in the spring this hasn't kicked in yet with the extensions of the child independent care tax credit for child care costs they're in essence tax cuts for low-income working families and middle-income families so i think some of those supports should continue i think one of the areas of of policy where frankly we didn't do enough of in 2020 try as we might we i was one of the people trying month after month we couldn't get the votes for more food assistance then we finally got support in in december of 2020 and then even more so much more so in the rescue in the rescue bill but there are going to be some communities where a tax credit or food assistance or other ways of direct support may not may not be enough help we have to be responsive to the needs of those particular communities you mentioned the lgbtq plus community that's a community where the the rate of of contracting the virus is even higher sometimes because often folks in that community were on the front line they were working in in circumstances where they had more exposure to the virus they as a community of americans i think deserve our attention and our focus when it comes to strategies to be responsive uh to the virus but also or to be responsive to the pandemic but also to figure out ways to be supportive moving forward but that's why we've i think we've all begun to examine health care policy tax policy in so many areas of of federal law through the through a different lens than we did before the pandemic we realized if anything in the grip of this pandemic how inequitable our system can be how the system can be rigged uh against a lot of americans i've said for a long time and i know i offend some americans when i say this but we've had a tax code that's been rigged for 40 years in my judgment against the middle class and lower income working people to the benefit of very very wealthy americans and huge multinational corporations and that just didn't happen 40 years ago it happened again in 2017 with the tax bill which i voted against and i'll i would have voted against a hundred more times because it was more rigging of the tax code for the most powerful people in our society who can hire the lobbyists to ram through a bill like that well what i'm aiming to do in this next bill is to turn a lot of that on its head to say we're finally going to invest in people who are struggling every day and need the federal government to stand up for them but i know we'll get we'll get a lot of howling from some in washington but i know the way i'm going to vote you next question good evening senator i'm diane irish i'm proud to be a social worker living and working in lehigh county i've tried very hard for over 26 years now to help children and their families through a variety of difficult circumstances and my question isn't unrelated to the last one but as i'm sure you're very well aware the minimum wage has been stagnant at 7.25 since 2009 and there is absolutely nowhere in this nation where someone working 40 hours a week at 7.25 cents an hour can afford a place to live so my question for you is would you please tell us what you will be doing what specific actions you'll be taking to raise the minimum wage to a living wage where people can afford a place to live that's a great question did you said your first name is diane dan thanks and thanks for doing the work that you do that's not easy um and i admire what you do we had a moment in march of 2021 where we're just beginning work to pass the first the first segment i should say of the rescue plan we had to do two we had to go through two two procedures uh one was the budget resolution which is exactly what we did last week on the on the upcoming bill and then we had time in between that time and when we voted on the reconciliation bill but as we got started in that process the first amendment that was offered for a vote was a vote on the minimum wage the senate because of the way the senate has uh so many uh strange and often difficult arcane rules uh one of the one of the the the the hurdles to getting that bill voted on as part of that budget resolution process or reconciliation process ultimately was to we had to wait the determination by the senate parliamentarian the senate parliamentarian said you can't vote on that in this bill that in order to get the minimum wage bill over the goal line to get enough votes for it you it had to be subjected to the senate 60 vote rule some people call it the filibuster rule but nobody knows the definition of filibuster so i call it the 60 vote rule it would have been easier obviously to pass a minimum wage increase with 51 instead of 60 but we couldn't do it so that's the that's the dilemma we face uh the proposal that i supported was to raise the minimum wage from from where it is now it literally has not gone up at the federal level since 2009.
we voted in 2007 to raise it didn't go into effect until 2009 but it hasn't changed since then so all these years later all of the cost increases later in the life of a family it hasn't hasn't increased we're trying to get it to to 15 an hour over the course of of just five years but in order to do that you've got to pass a bill and you have to get 60 votes so unless we can get a handful of republican votes to support that bill there's not going to be an increase in the minimum wage and that's the the reality uh right now now the other pathway and the only other pathway is if the rules of the senate were to change so that it's not 60 votes it's just 51 votes and that would apply to increasing the minimum wage that would apply to to voting rights as we mentioned in our first question that would apply as well to so many other areas of policy that don't fit under the budget umbrella that you can do with just 51 votes so that's the complexity of it but that's also the reality of it we either have to get 60 votes now or change the 60 vote rule to make it 51. and i think it's i think it's vital that we get that that that wage up and and do it in the fashion the bill outlines over the course of uh over the course of five years last thing i'll say is one of the best ways to improve the life of a child now and certainly years and decades from now is to raise the minimum wage for the parent or caregiver who's taking care of that child all the evidence shows that so it's a kids issue as much as it's a worker issue thank you thank you senator casey for coming here my name is kathleen parsons i live in coopersburg pennsylvania and i am a school board director for southern lehigh school district i really want to thank you for passing the cares act because that money allowed us to have enrichment classes for the students during the summer and hiring more teachers so we can have smaller classes now it makes a big difference and that's in a district like mine so i know that it helped other district districts as well my question is nothing about that well thanks for serving on school board talk about brave i think you have to be even braver than you do to be a member of city council or any kind just for now hopefully we'll get back to normal times my question is how do you think we can change campaign finance laws well there are a lot of ways to do it but again this is still it's in that same category we need we need 60 votes to do that now uh one of the one of the areas i think of of policy that that probably a lot of people missed was and this is just my view i've i've run in a lot of elections in federal and state and in the federal elections um try as we might i say we i mean our country our government the congress over time to to have a positive impact on campaign finance by limiting the amount of money one individual can give to a federal candidate that was supposed to take care of a lot of these problems it didn't over time but that was one attempt years ago to limit the amount you can give in a federal race state races you can give one person could give 10 million dollars if they wanted to but under federal law as bad as that system was before 2010 before the supreme court took up a case it got a lot worse after that after that case so-called citizens united that just kind of blew the the roof off of of those limits so now you had under law under american law the the opportunity for one individual to give unlimited amounts of money to in into a campaign dynamic they could be promoting one candidate or attacking another or both and you can find out very little about that person so that's why they call it dark money i'd like to use even stronger language it's it's gross it's obscene and it's terribly terribly destructive of of our system so as bad as our campaign finance system was at the federal level before citizens united it got exponentially worse since then and it's one of the reasons why we have some of the divisions we have in our country not the only reason but that's one reason because of campaign finance the only way to deal with that because some would challenge it and become a supreme court free speech issue which i think frankly is a joke under the way the supreme court has dealt with it that's just my view one of the ways to deal with it is to pass legislation like as i mentioned as part of that for the people act where you would apply a measure of scrutiny on those donors that there is not today i mean look i i'm all for someone coming into the you know we figuratively talk about the public square i'm all for the great american way you get to come to the public square and you get to have your say so if you're an oil billionaire and you want to come to the public square and say i'm for this candidate or i'm for this issue or whatever you want to say that's fine but we cannot have a system where that billionaire comes to the public square and has the biggest megaphone and can outshout anyone he can outshot a thousand people because he has so much money and he has a big cloak over him you can't see who he is you can't find out who he is that's what our system is today you need to hire you would need to hire a private investigator to find out sometimes who's funding these campaigns because sometimes they fund one organization and it gets laundered through that organization to another into another before you know you can't nobody knows where the money originated and it's it's really destructive so as as frustrated as i am uh to have that part of that part severed and and have a separate voting rights initiative that might be might be voted on on its own i think we almost have to do that because of how important voting rights is but we cannot leave on the side of the road these efforts to bring scrutiny and sunlight and transparency uh to to these uh you know big money in in politics it's bad enough before 2010 it got a lot a lot worse since then but thanks for raising it i was being very careful there not to use bad language because it gets me those were in the ground rules too and i'm trying to follow the cunningham rules here all right hello senator well i wanted to extend in my gratitude for your leadership and your thoughtful responses system to some very difficult uh topics so you had earlier alluded to environmental justice or more specifically inequities in our communities and so what i'd like you to elaborate on more is what does congress need to advance environmental justice specifically how do we make sure president biden's justice 40 commitments are met and ensure at least 40 percent of environmental benefits head directly into low-income communities and to communities of color what is your first name maria ocasio i'm a film coordinator in the lehigh valley for penn future cvp alan tony and first and foremost great well thanks for doing that work penn future does great work i probably won't be able to give you a a full answer but i'll i'll try my best to try to hit some of the high points as i said before sometimes a crisis can reveal both inequities and and also present some opportunities the crisis of kova 19 forced all of us to look at some issues in a different way and to consider not only points of view but but perspectives we might not have considered before uh in health care and in so many other areas of policy i think the same is true of climate change because climate change is such a such an existential threat to all of us it it is a definitively a threat to human life itself not just that we're going to have a lot of communities destroyed if we don't confront it but human life will be at risk if we don't deal with it but it but it also has has caused us to focus on some of these issues that we probably weren't thinking of at all or or not not paying enough attention to and one of the one of the the challenges we have with climate change is not simply putting in tax incentives tax strategies and other efforts to get more people to be in the future driving electric vehicles and by the way that that will come about because of a bipartisan largely because of a bipartisan effort in this recent bill so it's not just democrats saying this republicans are saying it too electric vehicle charging stations having that network set up so that if you're going to buy an electric vehicle you have a place to charge it you got to set up that huge and i'll use the word again infrastructure um obviously we have to uh get to the the goals we we want to lower emissions but there's so many so many uh elements to the strategy that you have to consider every possible uh pathway to get to a lower carbon economy lowering emissions and one of the ways that we can begin to tackle that or be part of the overall strategy is conservation we have a great history in our state of conservation it goes back hundreds of years fifty years ago we put a conservation amendment in the state constitution article 1 section 27 here's what it says the people have a right to clean air pure water into the preservation of the natural scenic historic and aesthetic values of the environment and then the amendment goes on to talk about each one of us as citizens of the whole state being trustees of the public natural resources of the state so it's not like a a suggestion or a try to do good job kind of amendment it is a directive on all of us and especially those of us who hold elected office federal state or otherwise so conservation is is important to our state constitutionally mandated but it's also an important part of of climate change mitigation and and the confrontation we have to have with these climate issues what i want to do in this as part of this larger effort on climate and the next bill we're talking about is to make sure that we have a a resuscitation of or a new version of the old 1930s civilian conservation corps we should be creating jobs through federal government funding and yes i'm saying that federal government dollars but have it locally directed and designed so you can decide here in a particular community whether it's allentown or even a much smaller community what are the conservation initiatives you want to undertake and what will how will that be designed and how we will hire people who will be the sponsor will be a conservation district or organization will it be penn future will it be a single farmer who could do this lots of options under my bill so that we're using conservation as yet another way to bring to bear not just solutions on climate but bring a measure of environmental justice to communities that have been ravaged for far too long as i said before lower income communities and communities that are both lower income and communities of color tend to have some of the worst environmental degradations heaped on them year after year in generation after generation a civilian conservation corps is one of the ways to tackle that to actually send workers in to to focus on that community now it also involves equity when it comes to issues like health care and getting wages up and and so many other strategies it's not just conservation and climate mitigation but i think we can get there by bringing kind of a whole of not just whole of government but really whole of society approach to tackling climate change and environmental justice has to be part of that and senator i believe we have just two quests coming up we have two questions remaining we have about five minutes so we should be able to get them both then if if we move along thank you good evening senator casey my name is sean corbin and i'm an educator in the allentown school district on the 31st of august i will begin my 18th year of teaching in 2007 my name is what do you get for 18 years do you get like a gold watch or anything or do you get a new house or what i got my library taken away from me okay we'll keep going let me hear okay uh in 2007 which was my third year of teaching a program was created by congress and i believe that was your first year in office it was it was yes and you created the public service loan forgiveness program with the promise go into public public service not just education but public service stay ten years we'll forgive your your loans i personally became eligible for that in 2017 i have been calling filling out reams of paperwork waiting calling paperwork since then and i am one of the 98 percent who has not who's been denied on multiple occasions from multiple things in july the pennsylvania higher education association agency announced it will not renew the contract as the only federal service student loan servicer bed loan servicing is also the only company administering the public service loan forgiveness and the attempt at fixing that the temporary expanded public service loan forgiveness program so long-winded i know i'm a teacher that's what i do um what senator casey is being done to help this program not the program but um the servicer transition and what's going to happen to those two programs there's a lot of us waiting yep now sean first of all thanks for being an educator never never been more important uh the work that you do and i really admire it um there's kind of two issues in one i'll i'll try to deal with both of them somewhat quickly the the first issue is on on loan forgiveness you're right that program has not met anywhere near the the promise that that was uh committed to and i think there's bipartisan multi-uh more than one administration a number of congresses that can get that should take blame for that so we're all at fault for that so we need a remedy for that to to figure out a way to make sure that that promise is kept uh to people like you who are who recorded the opportunity and then and then the promises were not met were you you said you would you met your end of the bargain and the federal government didn't meet their end of the bargain so that's that's one area policy where we need a remedy uh i don't think there's anything in the near term that would provide that kind of remedy but but i think you're owed that secondly on the the loan servicing issue which is even broader because you have some you have two two loans at fia here but then also one in new hampshire who are pulling out we have been told by the current leadership of the department of education they've only been there about six eight months not even eight months we've been told that they are in the process of filling that gap so for all kinds of loan servicing issues that office within the department of education has committed to making sure that they have a vehicle to replace those two that are pulling out it's about somewhere on the order of about 10 million americans whose loans will be impacted by not having that loan servicer but the department of education mr corduroy is actually running it who was with the consumer financial protection bureau has committed to to providing a a substitute entity organization to to do the work that the new hampshire and the pennsylvania entities were were going to provide but but i haven't seen yet uh know what entity that is whether it's been named yet but they claim that they're going to have that uh in time to provide help to uh those who have borrowed money that's what we've been told so we're going to monitor that closely but thanks for raising both both parts of that issue okay well thank you senator i think in the interest of time and the rain i believe your question was answered addressed in in other uh questions so uh i think so as not to get everybody soaking wet including you senator on behalf of everyone i want to thank you once again for being here in the lehigh valley for giving such thoughtful and and thorough answers to all these great questions uh from our residents thanks so much thank you so much thank you for being a great mc yeah i didn't have much to do you could do this full-time i could i could is it one of the easier jobs you had all the hard work thank you everyone for coming thank you cedar crest college for having us here doctor thank you casey thanks again for having us thanks everybody
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