Cheers & Jeers
Jeers: The Washington County Board of Commissioners finally did the right thing Thursday when it signed off on a $500,000 grant for a women’s shelter at Washington’s City Mission. The funding will come from the $9.2 million in the Local Share Account that the county receives from gambling revenue. You’ll recall that the grant was on a preliminary list of projects that was approved by the committee that determines how the money is divided up, but then it was inexplicably withdrawn. In an online meeting Wednesday, the committee backtracked and unanimously agreed that LSA money should go to the shelter. Members of the committee said they previously had concerns about how much money for the shelter was in place and how it would fit in with the county’s human services plan. But the initial refusal sure looked like political payback, since former commissioner Diana Irey Vaughan is now the president and CEO of City Mission. She had become a pariah among her fellow local Republicans because she stood up to them and refused to join them on misbegotten ventures like revisiting the 2020 presidential election. It’s good that the Local Share Committee and the commissioners corrected their mistake, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Cheers: If you scroll through social media feeds or watch local television news, it would be easy to believe we are living in a time when crime is rampant. Polling has shown that a majority of Americans believe crime is getting worse. In fact, data released this week by the FBI shows crime is actually heading downward after spiking during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the fourth quarter of 2023, there was a 13% decline in murder compared to the same time in 2022, a 6% decline in violent crime and a 4% decrease in property crimes that were reported to law enforcement. Jeff Asher, a former CIA analyst, told NBC News, “It suggests that when we get the final data in October, we will have seen likely the largest one-year decline in murder that has ever been recorded.” How did this happen? The explanation is pretty simple. John Roman, a criminologist with the University of Chicago, told NBC that during the pandemic “the courts were closed, a lot of cops got sick, a lot of police agencies told their officers not to interact with the public. Teachers were not in schools, working with kids.”
Cheers: Last spring, a marker was placed at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies in Washington County honoring Dennis Krisfalusy, an Air Force veteran who was killed with his wife, Lois, in a devastating earthquake that hit Mexico City in 1985. The only problem for Krisfalusy’s family, though, is that Lois’ name could not be placed on the stone because of a federal rule that does not allow the names of eligible spouses or dependent children to be added to a headstone or marker if they died before 1998 or after last October. But Guy Reschenthaler and Chris Deluzio are among two Pennsylvania congressmen who have introduced the Dennis and Lois Krisfalusy Act, which would have the Department of Veterans Affairs provide a headstone or marker in a national cemetery for a dependent child or spouse of a veteran regardless of when they died. Reschenthaler said, “I am honored to introduce this commonsense legislation that cuts bureaucratic red tape for families like the Krisfalusys and ensures we provide the utmost support for those who have sacrificed so much for our nation.”