PENNSYLVANIA — This morning, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti joined WILK Morning News to highlight yesterday’s historic announcement of President Biden’s Build Back Better framework.Cognetti lauded the package, noting that it would have her “investing in the next 100 years, not just 100 days or even the next 10 years.” She also highlighted the “enormously transformative” investments in universal pre-K, elder care, Medicaid expansion and efforts to fight climate change, which will have a major positive impact on local Pennsylvania communities.
WILK News Radio: Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti talks Build Back Better on WILK’s Morning News
[…] [The Framework] is enormously transformative. It invests in the type of things that we need. We’ve got me investing in the next 100 years, not just 100 days or even the next 10 years. This is a type of bill that gets in our way to do that, from the climate resilience pieces to investing and things like universal pre-K.It has universal pre-K for three and four year olds, which is huge. It’s a childcare piece that limits childcare costs for families, to no more than 7% of their income for families earning up to 250% of their state’s median income. It’s enabled states to expand access to about 20 million children.
[…]The health care piece is so huge in the center. Casey has been fighting for this for a long time. He’s always been fighting for kids and also for elder care solutions. So the home health care piece, as we know, is a huge problem.
[..] it improves the existing Medicaid pieces, looking to end the existing backlog of people that can’t even get on Medicaid, and improve working conditions for home health care workers. That’s our future. I think people want to be able to age in place. We want to make sure that we have the people to help them age in place. This helps to strengthen that and then there’s a whole host of things.Senator Casey has worked on that. We need to do that on the federal, state and local level, improving those conditions for home health workers.
Big picture of it. It’s wonderful to have all of these pieces. I really would like us to be going big on a couple of the climate pieces and really like our electric grid, for example.
So I’m hoping that this is the beginning of what in the coming years can be an even bigger piece on some of these large things that we really have to get done. Some of these things like I would hope would have bipartisan support.
[…]This is why local government is so important. I talked to Senator Casey, we also have Congressman Cartwright who’s very accessible. I talk to the White House: we have a direct line here at the local level right here in Scranton, all the way up. So we’re able to communicate to our residents what’s in what’s out.
That communication line is really important. Washington and the White House aren’t that far away from us. But we really do have that communication. And so it’s important that we have these, these connections and we’re able to talk about these things at a local level.
At every government level, every household level, there’s compromise being made.
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