Since I’ve last posted here, our project has had some major developments.
For one, we made the complete shift to having the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Uniontown as our stakeholder.
As I mentioned before, our sustainability group had another site visit in Uniontown in late October to gather information for our new project focus, that being to help Uniontown City Hall expand their capacity. Those who attended included members and leaders from the redevelopment authority, police department, code enforcement, city council, parks and recreation, and a board focusing on the Sheepskin Trail, a non-motorized rail-trail in Fayette County. At this meeting, we facilitated discussions on what each of these departments are looking for to expand their capacity, or what other issues they are consistently running into.
After this meeting, and before our final presentation in Uniontown and Connellsville on December 6th, we got to work trying to help address some of these issues. We came up with four deliverables, which I will summarize below.
Gap Analysis from October 25th Site Visit: For our first deliverable, we consolidated and organized all the data we received on our October 25th visit into a more digestible document. We listed the needs of each department by priority and theme. We also created two graphs showing the number of priorities by department and performance by department. It’s important to note here that this is not an exhaustive list of where resources can or should be used in Uniontown, nor is this analysis intended to be permanent. This is a snapshot of where focus is needed in Uniontown right now.
We hope that by creating a space to discuss across departments where Uniontown’s needs are, recording and organizing the results of that discussion, and identifying some common themes, we helped make their planning going forward a bit easier. In particular, Uniontown is currently in the midst of writing their city’s Comprehensive Plan. Our most pertinent goal with this gap analysis was to help make the writing of this plan more efficient.
Uniontown Government Organizational Chart: One of the priorities of Uniontown’s redevelopment authority is an organizational chart (“org chart”) that illustrates what positions Uniontown City Hall has and how they are connected. The redevelopment authority believes this will play a key role in helping Uniontown progress their approval and implementation of Pennsylvania’s Strategic Management Planning Program, a state grant that, if awarded, would provide Uniontown funding to help support financial development initiatives. In addition to this, the org chart is intended to provide an easier way to determine what government positions Uniontown needs. This deliverable allows government boards and employees to see how all the members of Uniontown City Hall connects, as well as what gaps exist in the various departments. Regarding these gaps, and in addition to an org chart illustrating Uniontown City Hall’s current configuration, we also created a separate org chart that includes the desired positions city representatives expressed on October 25th.
Ensuring Future Work: Our third deliverable consisted of identifying and setting up next semester’s Sustainability Capstone focus. Through our interviews and site visits, we learned that a significant need in Uniontown is assistance with blight remediation. The city currently does not have a blight remediation plan to address the residential blight in their community. Next semester’s capstone will help address this by assisting in site assessments. There are roughly 4,000 residential properties in Uniontown that must be surveyed to determine the severity and extent of the city’s residential blight; however, Uniontown does not have the funds to complete these site assessments right now. To fill this gap, next semester’s students will visit a significant portion of these residential sites and take pictures of the properties. After this initial site visit is complete, students will complete property assessments from these photos. The consultants Uniontown hired to create the city’s blight remediation plan will use this data.
Lastly, as the semester comes to a close, we are amid setting up a Pitt internship to help with Uniontown’s business development. A student intern in this position would assist Uniontown’s redevelopment authority as they utilize funding from the Pennsylvania Main Street Matters program to create a city plan that encourages economic development through business resource identification and creation. This internship will take place in the Summer and/or Fall of 2025. This internship fits into one of the major needs identified during our site visits, that being support for businesses in Uniontown.
With the explanation of our deliverables out of the way, I’d like to now talk about our final presentations.
On Friday, December 6th, the entire ARC-ACRI group held our final presentation in Connellsville. Before our sustainability capstone group went down to Connellsville, we headed to Uniontown to present to some representatives from Uniontown City Hall. Many of the attendees were at our October 25th meeting, but there were some new representatives as well. Our presentation mostly consisted of explaining our final deliverables to the attendees.
The most fruitful thing about this meeting was not the presentation itself, but the discussion we had afterwards. Upon asking the group how Pitt could help Uniontown via the ARC-ACRI, representatives started discussing different ideas that they saw as the most relevant. One of the first ideas brought up was by the Chief of Police. He said it would be useful to have some sort of resource pool with surrounding municipalities that were about the same size as Uniontown. The idea here was that if Uniontown was having a particular issue, due to their similarity, a nearby town may be having the same issue, and they could either brainstorm solutions, or that other town could recommend action steps if they already solved that issue in their community. The same would be true in instances where Uniontown has a solution to an issue relevant to a neighboring municipality. Essentially, the goal was increased communication between communities in Fayette County.
As a student observing, and partially facilitating, this conversation, it was eye-opening to how local government operates; I had not previously considered how much progress depends on constant collaboration. There is no easy handbook to follow, which is easy to forget as someone not involved in my hometown’s politics. Things don’t just happen the way they seem to – it takes many meetings like this in which people share ideas, make concessions, and come to agreements. This was something I conceptually knew before, but seeing it in action connects that “theory” into something real.
We stayed at City Hall for roughly an hour and a half; we had to wrap up at a point to make it to the Connellsville presentation. The time that the Uniontown City Hall representatives gave to us was invaluable to our project. I really hope they were able to take something away from that time that can be useful to them.
I personally did not present at the Connellsville Canteen, which meant I was able to watch the entire presentation, which was something I enjoyed. It was great to see the different ARC-ACRI topics converge in one presentation. In the future, I think both the community and students would benefit from this meeting being more of a discussion than a presentation. Having experienced both that day, I got the impression that the discussion-based meeting was more worthwhile for the community members in attendance.
At the start of this project, we were told to take a strengths-based approach to our research. However, when reflecting on all the conversations we had this semester with members of Uniontown, something that came up again and again was what Uniontown needs. At our first site visit, when we talked to Simmons about leveraging Uniontown’s strengths to bring space-adjacent manufacturing into the community, she told us that Uniontown needed to address more immediate needs. During the two group discussions with Uniontown City Hall members, the discussion was on what Uniontown needs in order to function more efficiently – higher wages to attract more police officers, more business revenue, written plans that that qualify Uniontown for certain types of grant funding, etc. With all the switching gears we did this semester, speaking to the community on their terms was the most important. What I mean by this is that those we spoke to wanted to “cut to the chase” so to speak. They wanted to talk about what Uniontown needs, not what they already have. I got the sense – because it was sometimes said explicitly – that people in Uniontown felt like they were being left behind by the rest of Pennsylvania. By following the lead of the community members, by which I mean talking about the issues Uniontown was facing head on, they could establish this accountability. Yes, Uniontown is struggling, but this is due in large part to the unequal attention the Pennsylvania government pays to its municipalities. At least, that is the opinion of many of the people we spoke to, and I am inclined to agree with them.
The most common need that came up time and time again from different representatives was a city manager. If I could “waive a wand” and implement anything in Uniontown, it would be that, because it was what people in Uniontown said they wanted most.
As we wrap up our work this semester, I have started to reflect more on these past four months. But I’ll save that for the last blog post.