Matthew Tuerk

And I think my conversations with Senator McCormick, he is somewhat agnostic about where that happens.

I think he's,

He'd be happy if the manufacturing investments happened in the suburbs or in the cities.

It doesn't matter to him as much as Pennsylvania remaining competitive.

I know he was involved with one of the big kind of future-thinking or future-looking manufacturing investments that occurred in our area is Eli Lilly announced a $3.5 billion investment that is just outside of the city limits.

But their $3.5 billion investment will create like 850 jobs.

I want to make sure that all of the residents of the city of Allentown are capable of accessing those jobs.

I also want to make sure that any of the supply chain that goes into that Lilly GLP-1 manufacturing can be produced in the city if it can be.

We want to make sure that we're capable of connecting to that.

So that's one thing, I think, continuing to make sure that the country is competitive.

The other thing is, and this is one that we're kind of going back and forth with, Governor Shapiro has launched a very aggressive economic development strategy that wants to attract more investment and lots of different types of investment.

i think there's and i've spoken with bruce katz uh formerly brookings about this is that pennsylvania seems like it's well situated to be a center of defense manufacturing in this new world clearly like there's based on what's happening in iran there is a like there's still need for munitions right and

How we can play a role in that is I think part of our future That was what we proudly tell the story of how Bethlehem steel helped win the war and World War two by building the the Ships that helped us win the war.

I talked about Volte bomber is helping us win the war I think that there is we have we're home to Mac defense in Allentown and

MacDefense makes giant, like heavy duty trucks for the U.S.

military.

We can compete in that area as well.

And that is manufacturing.

So I think there's the if the federal government focuses on creating opportunities in cities and in states to host manufacturing and makes it easy for that to happen and makes it easy to hire people and train people to be ready for that work.

I think that's that's where we need them to play.