This city once had a steel-based economy and critics now say it has a John Murtha-based economy but, in what used to be the 11-inch rolling mill of Bethlehem Steel, nobody's apologizing.
"You ask where the earmarks go?" said Bill Polacek.
He motioned to the floor of JWF Industries where his crews assemble armor plating for military vehicles in an abandoned steel plant. He recited the statistics: 500 employees at JWF, each of which means jobs for four people down the line.
"When you ask about the congressman and his earmarks, tell that to the 2,000 families in this valley that are being supported largely by the defense business that would have gone somewhere, but came here," he said.
On the side of the plant, a two-story banner, still there from last year's election, broadcasts defiance to an outside world convinced the 18-term Democrat is up to no good:
"We Support John Murtha. He Delivers for Us."
Deliver he has.
Johnstown made Murtha the king of earmarks. Prone to floods and wracked by unemployment when steel collapsed, the city turned to its congressman to save its economy and Murtha, for his part, turned to the federal budget.
Johnstown Welding and Fabricating, which Polacek's father founded out of the family garage 50 years ago, is an example of the spinoffs that followed. During the recession of the 1980s, unable to get a job with an exterminating company, he turned his father's part-time welding firm into a full-time job. As Murtha earmarks reached defense firms, JWF began to bid as a subcontractor with those firms, doing complex jobs that employed the skilled welders displaced by the industrial collapse.
They've teamed with Lockheed on a $40 billion defense contract to build the replacement to the military Humvee.
On a suburban hillside, in a development called the John P. Murtha Technology Center, just a stone's throw from the John P. Murtha Airport, a group of locals set up Concurrent Technologies Corp., a nonprofit research and technology combine that found its footing with Murtha-directed earmarks.
Today CTC employs 1,400 people with 21 offices around the country and has a payroll of $66 million -- $40 million of it for the 800 employees stationed in Johnstown. A few miles from CTC's headquarters sits Kuchera Industries, another garage startup that struggled through the 1980s and then found itself flush with defense contracts under Murtha's tutelage.
Multinational firms, from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to DRS Technologies and the Norwegian firm Kongsberg Gruppen, have set up outposts here, capturing defense contracts and partnering with local companies such as CTC and JWF.
No one has tallied the amount Murtha has steered into his district, which sprawls well beyond the Conemaugh Valley and reaches the West Virginia border. Conservative estimates are in the billions of dollars, most of it lobbied from federal agencies or won through open bidding or, more controversially, steered home directly during his 35-year career.
Murtha, a 76-year-old Marine veteran schooled in the blunt-knuckle deal-making that defined politics here, is contrition-free when it comes to his success.
"If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district," Murtha said. "My job as a member of Congress is to make sure that we take care of what we see is necessary. Not the bureaucrats who are unelected over there in whatever White House, whether it's Republican or Democrat. Those bureaucrats would like to control everything. Every president would like to have all the power and not have Congress change anything. But we're closest to the people."
That proximity, and his role in shaping Johnstown's economy, has raised the ire of reform groups and the persistent curiosity of prosecutors.
Federal agents have subpoenaed records from a CTC subsidiary. In January, they raided Kuchera and carted away boxes of records. In suburban Washington, agents swarmed the offices of PMA Group, an influential lobbying group founded by Paul Magliocchetti, a former Appropriations defense staff member. Magliocchetti's firm lobbied for a number of companies that benefited from Murtha's earmarks, including CTC.
The reasons for the investigations remain unclear, but the common thread Murtha critics see connecting it all is the congressman's links to the various operations.
Critics of Murtha and the earmarks process say the congressman's success in directing federal dollars to businesses in his district has created a sort of triangular trade in politics: He directs earmarks to particular firms that hire lobbyists who, in turn, direct campaign contributions back to Murtha..
E-mail Dennis B. Roddy at droddy(at)post-gazette.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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