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Looking beyond coal: Greene County seeks to diversify its workforce

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Katlyn Allison poses with her father, Todd Allison, near Waynesburg last week. Her father's job loss in a coal-related field is inspiring her reign as 2015 Bituminous Coal Queen.

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Clemmy Allen, fourth from left, executive director of the UMWA Career Centers Inc., talks with staffers regarding job and career opportunities for displaced miners. From left are job developers Delas Stuzen and Matthew Pagac, Lisa Adams, deputy executive director, Allen, and Alison Hall, social media director.

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Robbie Matesic, Greene County’s director of economic development, is working on a strategy to diversify the county’s workforce for job opportunities beyond coal.

WAYNESBURG – Todd Allison remembers well the day in July 2013 when he and his co-workers at the Hatfield’s Ferry power generating plant in Masontown were called in for a morning meeting, a fairly routine event.

Allison, 51, of Carmichaels, said he and others didn’t think much about it until they entered the room and saw what he calls “the suits” from FirstEnergy Corp. sitting at the table.

Allison, a mechanic at the coal-fired plant for 21 years, said he and others weren’t surprised when the executives told them that the nearby Mitchell power plant was being closed, a subject of rumors for some time.

The Hatfield’s Ferry operation was a baseload plant with three units that generated 1,700 megawatts of power and ran around the clock, while the much smaller Mitchell plant was a “peak” plant that was powered up only when demand for electricity went beyond normal limits. Besides, the company had recently spent around $1 billion to install new scrubbers at Hatfield, so Allison and the crew figured their plant was in good shape for the future.

Then the “suits” threw the bigger blow: They were closing Hatfield’s Ferry, too, taking a total of 2,080 MW, or 10 percent of the company’s generating capacity, offline in October and laying off the 380 workers employed at the two facilities.

“In October 2013, sure enough, the layoffs came,” Allison recalled last week. For awhile, it appeared as though the big plant might be spared, he said, noting that his union and later local and state politicians talked with the company about a reprieve.

FirstEnergy offered positions at its other facilities, which some workers took, Allison said, adding that most of the jobs offered to union workers would have meant starting at entry-level positions far below their pay rates.

As a mechanic, he was kept on through the end of the year as part of a skeleton crew to address safety and environmental issues at the decommissioned plant.

But in mid-January 2014, Allison, too, was out of work.

While few knew it at the time, his coal-related job loss and those of his co-workers were some of the earlier casualties in an industry that, for a variety of reasons, is now shedding mining jobs at an accelerated rate in Southwestern Pennsylvania and throughout West Virginia.

Five months later, in May 2014, Allison was hired as a compressor station technician in the natural gas industry, fortunate to transfer his mechanical skills to another industry.

But he lived through a period of great uncertainty that impacted his wife, son and daughter.

A college graduate, he took courses through the Intermediate Unit to be eligible to become a substitute teacher and applied for countless jobs through CareerLink and other job sites and collected unemployment benefits.

His struggle to find suitable work became an inspiration for his daughter.

In August, Katlyn Allison, 17, was named the 2015 Pennsylvania Bituminous Coal Queen, and pledged to educate the public about the importance of coal not just for the nation, but particularly in small towns like Carmichaels, where its ups and downs have a huge impact on families’ lives.

According to the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, which represents the industry and its supply chain, there are 7,350 men and women in Greene and Washington counties who are employed by the coal industry, with an average annual salary of $79,127, far above the average per capita income of $49,399 in Washington County and $41,820 in Greene.

The alliance’s statistics show that the coal industry’s total economic impact to the two counties is $1.94 billion annually.

Greene County, which like Washington County, has in recent years seen employment in the natural gas industry soar as Southwestern Pennsylvania became an energy center for the Marcellus Shale, still counts high-paying coal jobs and the tax revenue from coal companies as a major underpinning of its economy.

That dependence isn’t surprising, since Greene is home to the country’s largest underground coal mine and is the second-largest coal-producing county in the nation.

Barbara Cole, office manager for the Greene County PA CareerLink office in Waynesburg said the majority of the region’s coal industry employees cited by Pennsylvania Coal Alliance work in mining in Greene County or are Greene County residents employed by mines in northern West Virginia and its panhandle.

“We do coal here,” said Cole.

The most recent statistics from the state Department of Labor and Industry’s Center for Workforce Information and Analysis bears that out. According to CWIA’s June employment profile for Greene County – the most recent available – four of the county’s top five employers were coal mines, with the fifth a mine repair and maintenance company.

But King Coal has been losing his grip of late, shedding jobs and idling miners in a place where coal mining has been a way of life.

The mounting losses – now by rough count several hundred, in addition to the nearly 400 jobs shed by the closure of the power plants two years ago – have workforce officials like Cole sensing that the industry’s struggles could be different from its more usual boom-bust cycles of the past.

Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its final draft of its Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce harmful carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030. While a dozen states have filed lawsuits to slow or halt the implementation of the regulations, other factors are working against the mining industry.

“It’s not just the EPA,” said Robbie Matesic, Greene County’s executive director of economic development. “There are market conditions – the parity between natural gas and coal prices – and coal export demand has slowed,” she said.

All of those factors weigh heavily on a coal-based economy.

According to a recent study by the CWIA, the loss of 100 mining jobs has a projected “multiplier” effect that can eliminate many other jobs in the coal supply chain and beyond.

The CWIA calculates that each 100 jobs lost from mining has a multiplier of 2.4, and in mining support, 4.6 times and in power generation job losses, a multiplier of 3.9. By comparison, CWIA notes that the average multiplier for job loss impact in other industries in Pennsylvania is just 1.9.

“Thus, a loss of 100 jobs in coal mining may result in an estimated total loss of 244 jobs,” the analysts write. “Similar calculations for 100 job losses in the other two industries are even more dramatic, resulting in 461 job losses in support activities for mining and 388 job losses in electric power generation.”

No one understands the CWIA’s math better than Allison. The 380 positions lost at the two power plants, he said, were just the beginning. “Those were just the power plant workers and their families who were affected.”

When the Hatfield’s Ferry plant had outages for maintenance, he said, crews of skilled laborers were brought in: boilermakers, ironworkers, electricians, insulators and their suppliers.

“Sometimes there were 200 workers at a time, sometimes 300 to 400 working there one to two months at a time,” Allison said. “They depended on that work.”

But that long-term dependence on good-paying coal jobs can also keep people from considering other work, even when faced with layoffs for months or even years.

Cole said she’s worried that many laid off miners aren’t serious enough about pursuing other types of work, opting to hold out for callbacks.

She noted that earlier this summer, when Murray Energy Corp. idled 170 miners at the Blacksville Mine No. 2, just over the Greene County border in Blacksville, W.Va., her office launched a “rapid response” program to reach out to the affected miners, renting a VFW hall for the day and lining up employment counselors and others to help with everything from finding new jobs to earning a general education development diploma.

She said just eight of the idled miners came to the event.

She believes that people may be holding out for callbacks because of what they experienced in the 1980s, during one of coal’s last big downturns, when many were put out of work when the industry went into a long slide, then ramped up again as demand returned.

This time around, though, Cole isn’t certain that a turnaround is in the cards.

“I think these guys are hoping for that piece, but I’m not sure with the present administration that that is going to happen,” Cole said in reference to the EPA’s final draft of its Clean Power Plan.

She also sees another reason for urgency in getting displaced miners to visit a career center and look for other work or new careers.

“They’ve only got 26 weeks of unemployment compensation,” she said, noting that in earlier downturns, unemployment benefits were often extended three or four times the current standard.

In addition to the Blacksville Mine layoffs, she notes the announcement by Consol Energy earlier this summer that it was letting 470 workers go as well as what will happen to miners at Alpha Natural Resources’ previously announced closure of its Emerald Mine. The company, which is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, said it would move as many miners as it could to its nearby Cumberland Mine.

Clemmy Allen, executive director of UMWA Career Centers Inc., headquartered near Ruff Creek, said that of the 500 miners at Emerald, “some of these will have enough time in to retire, and some will go to Cumberland Mine, but there probably still will be a couple of hundred people looking for something to do.”

Allen said the UMWA Career Center, which has been helping displaced miners since 1996, has been busy in coal’s current downturn since 2012 at mines in southern West Virginia, but added that the idling trend “has been gradually working its way north” to mines in Northern West Virginia and to Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Delas Stuzen and Matthew Pagac, job developers at the UMWA career center, said that since May, they’ve seen more than 200 miners displaced by Northern West Virginia mines, including some who reside in Greene County.

“Most of the miners who come in here have a pretty reasonable idea of where they want to go after coal mining,” Allen said, noting that some want to become certified residential electricians, while others hope to attend a truck-driving school to earn a commercial driver’s license, or CDL. Others want to start their own businesses, he said.

Allen said his career center’s focus on West Virginia is due to that state’s offer of $5,000 National Emergency Grants for laid-off miners, which provides funds for those working in mines of more than 50 employees who receive WARN Act notices. He said the grants can be extended to spouses and other family members of miners to help them find other types of work or to train for new occupations.

Cole said the logical place to find work for some miners would be the natural gas industry, adding that with the current downturn in that industry, finding jobs there isn’t an option.

Ami Gatts, president of the Washington-Greene County Job Training Agency, said she has received approval for $420,000 in rapid response funds for displaced miners here that provide up to $8,000 toward training for new occupations. The money, Gatts explained, comes from the federal government, but is distributed by the state. With Gov. Tom Wolf and the state Legislature currently at a budget impasse, it’s unknown when WGCJTA will be able to get the money to those who qualify for it.

Despite the impediments, Cole said she sees some bright spots for employment opportunities, noting that there remains demand in the area for people with CDLs. She said a CDL course will be offered at the Westmoreland County Community College’s branch in Waynesburg.

Allen, whose center is a partner in Greene County’s effort to diversify its economy beyond coal, believes there will still be a place for coal, even if it isn’t used here.

“Coal’s not dead by a long shot,” he said. “You might not use any more coal in the U.S., but the rest of the world’s going to burn it. Some major players are going to be distributing coal overseas,” he said.

Greene County is launching a major initiative to diversify itself beyond its traditional coal mining roots.

“We really need to be very aggressive about diversifying the economy here,” Matesic said, describing a grant application she’s written for $100,000 to develop a strategy for incorporating the workforce into Catalyst’s overall plan. She said Chevron Corp. is matching the amount with another $100,000 specifically for job training.

Matesic and Don Chappel, executive director of Greene County Industrial Developments Inc., said they’ve been working with Pittsburgh-based Catalyst Connection Chief Executive Officer Petra Mitchell, who recently was successful in having the Pittsburgh region designated as part of an investment in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Manufacturing Communities Partnership initiative. Mitchell’s work showed that the region has 62,000 high-paying jobs in the metals manufacturing sector responsible for $2.1 billion in exports. Her study found that the jobs can be grown to 77,000 positions in the next decade. Matesic said her grant application to the U.S. Economic Development Administration, if approved, will be used to plan ways for retraining Greene County’s displaced mining workforce for other good-paying jobs.

Along the way, Matesic and Chappel said they’ve also received support of 20 to 25 business and economic development and community colleges in the region for their effort, including Westmoreland County Community College, ShaleNET, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, the Southwest Corner Workforce Investment Board, the Pennsylvania Small Business Development Center, Southwest Planning Commission, West Virginia University and Carnegie Mellon University.

“We’ve garnered attention on us like we have never had before on a federal, state and local level,” said Matesic. “It’s an opportunity to hit the reset button.”

One of the major factors in getting the diversification initiative off the ground was winning the support of the United Mine Workers Career Center, which is helping displaced miners to look at other career options.

“We know we have a big cultural hurdle,” Matesic said.

“Coal miners are finding it hard to believe they have to move on and look for other opportunities,” added Chappel.

Allison said those who find themselves out of a coal-related job need to be proactive.

“You need to ask yourself, what is your Plan B?” he said, urging them to visit the CareeerLink office.

“Some of these guys are being in denial. We all lived through that, myself included. All of a sudden, it’s right in your face,” he said, recalling that when he received the layoff, the Allisons’ son, Andrew, was in college and he made a promise to Katlyn he wouldn’t take a job that would make her change schools, something he wondered if he could honor. His wife, Lisa, was working when he lost his job and her health benefits covered the family.

“She was a big part of this equation,” he said. “We felt really blessed when this job offer came up.”

For Katlyn, who grew up around the coal show pageant, serving as a crown bearer as a little girl, her father’s job loss changed the way she views her reign as coal queen.

“It really hit home when my dad lost his job,” she said, adding that some friends’ parents who work in the mines have had their hours cut, while she knows others whose fathers took jobs out of town.

“It’s not just a fun coal show now,” she said. “I have a real passion for the coal industry now that I’ve lived through what is happening to my community.”

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