A haunting recording of a desperate flood victim’s final 911 call silenced a room full of Carbon County business owners, municipal officials and community leaders Tuesday morning.

It also set the tone for a two-hour legislative breakfast at Blue Mountain Resort that covered everything from emergency dispatch shortfalls to soaring electricity rates and a housing crisis that is keeping young residents from planting roots in the county where they grew up.

The Carbon Chamber and Economic Development Corporation hosted its inaugural 2026 Legislative Update, bringing together state Sen. David Argall, state Rep. Doyle Heffley, Carbon County Commissioner Wayne Nothstein, Carbon County Council of Governments President Kara Scott and Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Assistant District Executive for Design Scott Vottero to brief attendees on the policies and investments shaping the county in the year ahead.

911 funding

Before speaking a word of his own, Nothstein played a news clip from the July 4 flooding in Kerr County, Texas, in which overwhelmed dispatchers fielded more than 500 calls in two hours — including the final plea of a man who did not survive.

The silence that followed was brief.

“That is why I’m so passionate about the 911 surcharge,” Nothstein said. “As a county commissioner, we’re responsible for public safety answering points. We need to ensure our dispatchers are properly trained. A new dispatcher takes 300 hours to train. Recruitment is tough. I’d like to see higher wages. It’s a stressful job.”

Carbon County is in the middle of upgrading its radio communications system from analog to digital, a project that includes 465 portable radios alone. The county received $2.1 million in grant funding toward updating repeaters and related infrastructure, Nothstein said, but the ongoing costs strain a budget that has seen slow revenue growth.

“Our economic growth is only through property value,” he said. “In 15 years, from 2011, total property value in the county only increased $125 million.”

The 911 surcharge — collected on phone bills — was raised to $1.95 on March 1, 2024, and extended at that rate until Dec. 31, 2029. Nothstein called it inadequate.

The county commissioner association’s top three priorities this year are assisting counties in conducting timely property reassessments, adequate mental health funding and increasing the 911 surcharge — in that order, Nothstein said.

‘Nobody Can Afford Houses Anymore’

The housing shortage emerged as the morning’s most persistent theme, surfacing in nearly every panelist’s remarks and drawing pointed questions from the audience.

“The jobs are now here,” Argall said. “For many years in Carbon County, the cry was always jobs, jobs, jobs. The key now is, where are the workers going to live?”

Heffley put a number to the shortfall, projecting that Pennsylvania will be 185,000 housing units short by 2028. He described regulatory burdens and building codes as major obstacles to development.

“We need more houses. That’s no secret,” he said. “We have worked so much on blight, trying to get some of these blighted properties back on the tax rolls, but we need some help from our state partners and some of the regulatory agencies that really put burdens on how we develop those properties.”

The conversation sharpened when local Realtor Aggie Schoenberger, president of Peaceful Nights, addressed the panel directly.

“One out of three people in Carbon County aged 18 to 34 are living at home,” she said. “More housing isn’t going to bring the price down anytime soon for them to afford a place to move out, especially if they’re single. One out of nine people in our county lives below the poverty line.”

She proposed a local zoning fix: allowing landlords to rent individual rooms in multi-bedroom apartments to separate tenants.

“If the local townships and boroughs could allow landlords to take a three-bedroom rental and rent it to three different people, now there are three different people that can afford a place to live,” she said.

Nothstein agreed the solution could start at the local level.

“We need to revamp the zoning system and land use ordinances,” he said. “There are a lot of properties that could be used for housing.”

Scott, whose Council of Governments serves as the umbrella organization for the Reimagine Carbon initiative, framed the housing shortage as a generational threat to the county’s future.

“Housing is why our children can’t come back,” she said. “Nobody can afford houses anymore.”

Argall pointed to a pair of concrete examples of housing creation through historic preservation. In Weatherly, a century-old school building is being converted to apartments.

“That beautiful old Schwab school, dating back to the late 1800s, is going to be 30 apartments in what has been a blighted building for a long time,” he said. Argall and Heffley said they are working with county commissioners on blight and demolition, securing $250,000 in state funding for those efforts.

Energy: supply, demand and rising bills

The panel grew animated when the conversation turned to electricity rates, with Argall and Heffley offering a bipartisan diagnosis: Too many power plants have been shut down and not enough new ones built.

“Remember your high school economics classes on supply and demand? That’s the critical issue we’re facing, not just in Pennsylvania, but in a lot of our surrounding states as well,” Argall said. He announced plans to chair a public hearing on the issue in Pottsville in the coming months.

Heffley was blunter in assigning blame.

“We can’t continue to take down base load generating,” he said. “We spent trillions of dollars as a nation in the green energy deal. If you like your electricity rates the way they are right now, we can double down on that, but we’re subsidizing very expensive, unreliable energy sources.”

He cited Pennsylvania’s role as a net electricity exporter as a key driver of rising costs for in-state consumers.

“Virginia imports 34% of their electricity from Pennsylvania,” Heffley said. “If you want to know why your electric rates are going up, it’s because of that.”

The consequences, he said, fall hardest on those with the least.

“I have senior citizens that live on fixed incomes that come to my office to apply for assistance because they can’t turn their heat up in their house,” Heffley said.

Data Centers

Proposals to site data centers in rural Carbon County drew a spirited exchange. Heffley argued that rejecting such facilities means sending their tax revenue and jobs — along with the electricity Pennsylvania generates — to other states.

“If we build it in Virginia, you’re subsidizing electricity and we get nothing,” he said. “If we build it in our area, we can see those jobs.”

Scott urged caution without outright opposition.

“We need guardrails to protect the water usage,” she said. “Everything is consuming our water now, and we need to be paying attention to that because we have future generations.”

Nothstein said the county government would not try to steer local decisions on the issue.

“On the county side, we’re taking a hands-off approach,” he said. “It’s up to the local municipalities. Let them make the decision that’s right for them.”

I-80 bridge

Vottero updated attendees on the Interstate 80 bridge over the Lehigh River, a project that began its life as a proposed toll bridge before legislators successfully stripped the tolling component.

“This is a fracture-critical bridge over the Lehigh River, meaning it’s the same type of structure in Minnesota that failed,” Vottero said. “One element of the bridge fails, pretty much the entire bridge span goes with it. I know it is a lot of inconvenience to the public, but we should get most of this wrapped up next season.”

Heffley flagged the Interstate 80 bridge as evidence of the stakes involved in transportation decisions. “That bridge is one of the largest projects at PennDOT right now in the state,” he said. “For a while they were talking about tolling it. Terrible idea. We were able to prevent that from happening.”

PennDOT’s District 5, which encompasses Carbon and five other counties, maintains more than 3,000 miles of highway — second most in the state — and more than 2,000 bridges. For Carbon County this construction season, maintenance crews plan to apply nearly 4,000 tons of patching material, seal coat more than 40 miles of roadway, complete over 9,000 tons of base repairs and pave just under 5 miles of roads.

Vottero cautioned that federal transportation funding is set to expire Sept. 30, with no new bill in place.

“Flat funding in transportation is actually losing money,” he said, noting that construction inflation can run 2% to 9% in a given year.

He closed his remarks with a public safety message.

“Just be safe out there,” Vottero said. “We have a lot of people out there in construction and maintenance on the road. Distracted driving is real.”

Trails and tourism

Argall described tourism as the county’s top employment sector and rattled off a list of ongoing investments: the Lansford Trolley tour; the No. 9 Mine, which now draws more than 15,000 visitors a year and 1,000 new visitors added annually; the Reading & Northern Railroad’s upcoming Union Pacific Big Boy excursion in June (already sold out), and a growing network of biking and hiking trails.

He and Heffley are working to extend the 9/11 Memorial Trail from Jim Thorpe through the Panther Valley, through Tamaqua and on to Pottsville, where it would connect with the Schuylkill River Heritage Corridor. A dedicated cyclist, Argall added, could ride all the way to Philadelphia.

“When you come to Jim Thorpe, it’s an experience,” Heffley said. “You look up Broadway — it could be 2026 or it could be 1896. And how do we parlay that out into other areas?”

Scott, who also chairs the Bowmanstown Area Residents Connected community group, championed the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor trail as the connective tissue for the county’s communities.

“The D&L connects everything in Carbon County,” she said. “That is transportation. You can ride to Jim Thorpe and stay out of the traffic.”