BEAVER, Pennsylvania — Daniel Camp never expected to be governing Beaver County as an island, and he also never expected Gov. Tom Wolf to call him a coward. But both are happening.
Last Friday, Camp, as well as the other two commissioners who govern the county, sharply criticized Wolf for deciding to keep them in the restrictive red pandemic category, while the rest of the region will move to the less restrictive yellow category at the end of the week.
Wolf says it is because of their high number of cases of the coronavirus. Camp, and the other governing officials, argue those cases have almost all been confined to one nursing home, the Brighton Rehab and Wellness Center, and that the entire county should not be punished for one concentrated facility.
Wolf was adamant, so much so that in a press conference Monday, he not only called governing officials in counties such as Beaver cowardly, he also threatened their constituents by saying that funding for their counties would be slashed if they moved to the yellow phase of his color-coded reopening plan before he gave approval.
Wolf also threatened to take away liquor licenses and occupancy permits for business owners.
Beaver County was equally adamant, not in a wild-eyed “open at all costs” way, but from a position of reason, one shared by elected officials on both sides of the aisle.
“All of western Pennsylvania is yellow, then we are red,” Camp, a Republican, said. “It’s solely because of Brighton Rehab. That’s why our numbers are so high.”
Rob Matzie, a state representative and a Democrat, said if you look at the other counties all going to yellow, it makes little sense to isolate Beaver.
“I think it’s unrealistic, quite frankly, to keep a border county in red and not move to yellow when everything else in the region — including Ohio, West Virginia, which are both on our western border — are all opening in some capacity,” he said.
He added, “It is the nursing home numbers which are really the reason.”
Neither Camp nor Matzie is wrong.
Of the 479 COVID-19 cases to date in Beaver County, 319 of them are in Brighton Rehab; of the 78 who died in the entire county, all but seven came from Brighton Rehab.
Neither man is advocating for a full return to normal. Both are advocating to do what neighboring counties are doing: a slow ease toward some semblance of activity that still includes masks, that still includes restrictions on how people shop and work and live, but is in line without what their neighbors on both sides are doing.
Their reasoning has fallen on deaf ears with Wolf.
When you look at the Beaver County numbers, your initial reaction might be, “Well, things must be bad in Beaver,” explained Jay Cost, Gerald R. Ford Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributor to the Washington Examiner, who lives in neighboring Butler County.
“Beaver has 479 cases for a population of 165,000,” he said. “That works out to be 1 for every 344 people. Allegheny has 1 for about every 838 people. So, it looks bad, but the state also has a ZIP code map, which is actually really useful to look at. And when you look at the ZIP code map, you see Beaver doesn’t look all that different from the surrounding counties.”
Dig a little deeper, Cost explained, and you find three-quarters of all of the cases within Beaver County are at Brighton Rehab.
In short, the assessment of all three men is that Wolf and Dr. Rachel Levine, Pennsylvania’s secretary for the Department of Health, have shut this entire county down because of one rehab center.
“For any county, this would be an incredibly destructive thing to do. But Beaver is an especially vulnerable place whose population and industry have been in decline for decades,” said Cost.
He added, “It’s the classic story of a post-industrial county that, during between the Civil War and the 1970s, had been a place where industry was located. But industry has since closed down and moved to the South and moved overseas, and the population left there and working there are not at jobs where they can telecommute.”
Whether coming from Pittsburgh, Ohio, West Virginia, or neighboring Butler County, the entry point to Beaver County is lush and green, with the rolling hills of the Appalachian Mountains giving way to streams and rivers and creeks. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until the 1960s, the entry was a little bit different — with smokestacks jutting out from the valleys, coal mines dotting the landscape, and company houses lining the river towns.
The people who settled here were the people who built the ships and planes that protected us through two world wars, as well as the roads and buildings and bridges that built this country.
In fact, the name of the town Matzie calls home, Ambridge, was literally incorporated as a company town by the American Bridge Company in 1905. People who live here are proud to call Beaver County home. They have fought for its survival and raised their children and grandchildren here; they’ve built tidy homes and kept alive traditions that their parents and grandparents instilled in them.
Matzie is adamant the majority of people that want to open up come from an honest place and not from partisanship.
“I don’t think it is politics,” he said. “Look, full disclosure, my father’s in a long-term care facility. He’s 86 years old. My mother, soon to be 80, is at high risk. She is a pancreatic cancer survivor and a brain trauma survivor in the last five years. And has other health conditions, so they’re both high risk. So, for us, it’s real. I mean, we get it, we understand.”
He also gets the economic devastation happening to a county that is finally getting back off of its knees, thanks in part to the energy industry. He also believes you can simultaneously be emotionally devastated by the loss of a family member or a friend or a spouse and still be economically devastated and want things to open.
Those two can actually intertwine with each other. “They don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” Matzie said.
Drive down state route 68, and many of the businesses are closed. But there are exceptions, such as the iconic Brighton Hot Dog Shoppe, which is allowing drive-up pickups of their hot dogs, their heaping bowls of chili, and their generous servings of fries to feed the emotional needs of their customers to have and hold and taste something they’ve been enjoying for 50 years.
But there are many places that aren’t open — in particular, small mom and pop businesses.
Camp said on Mother’s Day he would typically go into town to get his wife flowers, a card, and a present from one of the tiny shops that are sprinkled all over the county. Instead, he was forced to go to Walmart.
“This administration thinks that it’s safer to go to Walmart to get a Mother’s Day card, where there are a thousand people walking around, than it is to the local Hallmark store in the Main Street in Beaver, where they can limit the store to two people and keep track of it,” said Camp.
He’s worried that the state government is picking winners and losers.
“We have businesses that are on the brink of never opening again,” Camp said. “People who built businesses their entire life. This isn’t just start-up businesses, and we’re going to change our way, and OK, this business failed. These are people who have worked for 30 years at one business. Now, we’re looking at closing them down forever.”
“The people who are getting screwed by all of this aren’t the consumers,” said Cost. “They can just drive down the road. It is the small businesses in Beaver. Think about this we have a governor who is economically isolating Beaver County, an economically vulnerable county because the government failed to lock down the nursing home — and it’s unconscionable.”
Since March 15, more than 1.8 million Pennsylvanians have filed for unemployment compensation.
Beaver County District Attorney David Lozier said his office will not prosecute business owners who open their doors on the same day that Wolf became the first governor in the United States to link the allocation of money to those who follow his stay-at-home orders.
This county isn’t the only one to state it will defy Wolf; Bucks, Schuylkill, Lancaster, Dauphin, Franklin, Lebanon, Huntingdon, and Cumberland counties have all indicated some sort of defiance against his orders. And even his home county of York has hinted of a possible rebellion.
Cost sighs at the arrogance and mismanagement of the whole thing: “I find it really ironic that a governor with a Ph.D. in political science has so little understanding of how politics actually works in his own state.”
