October 23, 2024 - Fifteen organizations sent a letter this week to both presidential candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, asking for continued federal investments in their efforts to re-energize the economies of coal communities. 

As the use of coal has declined, places with coal mines and power plants have lost their tax bases, and good-paying, blue collar jobs.

“It’s a real double hit,” said Dana Kuhnline, program director of ReImagine Appalachia, a coalition focused on economic development and one of the groups that signed the letter. These places worked to power the country, and have been on the losing end of the changing energy supply, something Kuhnline calls “a global and national level problem that is having these really intense impacts at this very local level.”

Over the past few years, with passage of laws like the Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and others, there has been historic investment in helping coal communities bounce back. 

“Bills where they really were finally given some of the resources to do…the stuff that we knew needed done,” Kuhnline said.

She’s talking about funding for workforce and economic development, flood control, clean energy, abandoned mine lands cleanup and expanding high-speed internet access.

The letter, sent by a variety of community development groups from coal states including Pennsylvania and West Virginia, urges the presidential candidates to keep up the momentum of this investment. 

“Wasting no time, we have rolled up our sleeves and gotten to work leveraging this new support to build a brighter future for our families and neighbors by advancing projects including renewable energy installations, new manufacturing facilities, and innovative brownfield and mine reclamation,” the letter states. “These initiatives are building community strength, prosperity, and self-determination, creating thousands of jobs, leveraging billions in private investment, and fostering community-driven economic development.”

However, the letter continues, the programs and investments are new, and their impacts have only started to address the challenges faced by coal communities. 

“Great things have happened,” Kuhnline said. “It’s just not enough.”

For example, she said that when the money started to become available, some communities didn’t even have internet service, which put them at a disadvantage in the competition for funding,  “And so you think about these hundred page grant applications for millions of dollars. It takes time to scale up to that.”

Kuhnline said she hears regularly from the Biden administration, which imposes mandates on community engagement and labor standards, when grant money is spent on community projects. 

So far, the groups have not heard back from either Harris or Trump in response to their letter.