[upbeat instrumental music] Good evening, citizens of Erie County.

It has been 20 days now since I took the Oath of office as your Erie County Executive.

I've taken much of this time to become familiar with the people who work in our agencies.

Those who serve on the front lines, and dealing with the needs of our citizens, and those who share my goal of a thriving county, and region.

When I say region, I mean the crescent of land, and the people around the lakefront.

Stretching to New York and the Ohio State lines, we rise and fall as a region, and Erie County needs to think in those terms, and act with a sense of unity the word region implies.

These are difficult times, but they need not be the closing years, and decades of decline, not if we act together and in good faith.

What we have here is a systematic decline in jobs and population that has been complicated by a pandemic unlike any others since the beginning of the 20th century.

If we're to work together, we need to be together.

That means dealing with the onslaught of COVID in ways that protect the public while not interfering with personal freedoms.

So let me first discuss how we need to deal with COVID moving forward.

Our health department's mission must be sharpened and focused if we are to beat this pandemic.

This means what I call the four T's.

Trust, transparency, testing and treatment.

The statewide response to the pandemic did not engender trust.

Mom and pop stores were closed, and their big box competitors, and online giants received a pass.

No explanation was given as to why some people were put out of work, and others kept working.

The government should not pick winners, and losers.

Our school is closed without clearly communicating with parents, and students precisely how we plan to get them open again.

The level of distrust of government's handling of the crisis with a seeming rules for the, but not for me attitude, left too many citizens distrustful that government understood very little of their problems.

You can't help people when you've lost their trust.

My administration will not make mandates unless absolutely necessary.

And if needed, the timeline and purpose will remain clear.

Most importantly, my administration, including myself, will not implement mandates in which we do not follow ourselves.

This is the part of the reason top-down mandates from masking to vaccines simply hasn't worked.

We need to build back trust.

We need to de-politicize COVID if we're ever to move forward.

This virus, it doesn't care how you voted it.

It doesn't go away simply because you don't believe in it.

This is why I'm vaccinated.

It's also why I encourage my staff to get vaccinated.

This past year, I personally lost two family members to COVID both choosing to not get vaccinated.

Likely, both would have had many years of life left ahead if they had chosen to get vaccinated.

We've all been touched in one way or another by the COVID pandemic.

A close friend of mine, she's a 40 year old physically fit single mother.

She never had complicated health issues, and she never thought that her health would decline to the point in which she would be signing a living will, giving the Power of Attorney, a medical directive decision to her 18 year old daughter, and potentially leaving behind two teenage children.

She laid in the hospital signing the medical directive with tears streaming down her face.

She wished she had gotten vaccinated.

Luckily, her story reads as one of the more fortunate ones.

She never had to go on a ventilator, and she walked out of the hospital over two weeks later.

She continues to struggle to maintain energy, to earn a living in the months following her hospitalization.

We've seen that the vaccine is not 100% effective in completely preventing COVID.

But what we do know, is it's 99% effective in making sure that COVID is less likely to kill you.

This past week, we had 11 COVID deaths in Erie County, all of which were unvaccinated.

I hope even the hardened skeptics out there ask themselves the hard questions, and consider getting vaccinated.

It will make it possible to keep our schools open, and for in-person learning to continue.

Any parent out there can tell you the social and personal costs of closing our schools.

Students aren't interacting.

Our kids are not learning how to socialize.

It's drains parents who need to work.

It pulls at the very fabric of our social structure in places where communities are identified as much by the schools as they are their industries.

We need to keep our schools open.

It is apparent the high levels of government are not positioned to make the best or the most agile decisions to solve the issues facing our communities.

For this reason, I lifted the countywide mass mandate, placing the decisions in the hands of the local elected school boards, and giving parents a voice in the decision-making process for what is best for their children.

We will continue to support our school districts with the resources, personnel, and the educational tools to meet the ever-changing landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But what we must implement our strategies, which work for our organizations, reduce the number of children unnecessarily quarantined by over restrictive quarantine guidelines, and enable their parents to remain at work.

This is how we keep our economy, and our schools open.

Vaccines, testing, and treatment will do just that.

But citizens must recognize the severity of this crisis.

We can't have another two years of a society in quarantine.

We have to come back outside, and we have to start rebuilding.

I have begun reshaping the mission of our hardworking, and dedicated Erie County Health Department.

We are blessed in this county to have a standalone health department run by some of the most dedicated, and hardworking people you will find in government.

People there have done great, in tracking this pandemic, and working to educate the public.

We now have the statistics, and it's time to properly analyze what we're seeing.

The pandemics affects cannot only be judged on numbers of cases, but rather the severity of those cases.

Now is the time to take action.

With that in mind, my administration has reached out to our medical and educational institutions to set up a program to make testing more widely available.

We saw a nightmare during the holidays, Omicron sweeping across the nation with too few tests available in many places.

My administration reached out to LECOM, the nation's largest medical school.

Working in conjunction, the County Executives Office, and the Erie County Health Department, for arranging to establish two full-time COVID testing sites open Monday through Friday.

My vision is a one-stop shop where individuals may receive testing, vaccination and treatment.

We're on such a strategy with LECOM Health System, and other partners as a way to help sick individuals, and to limit lost work time along with other interruptions to family and school routines.

As our health department works to identify hot zones by zip codes with severe outbreaks, we will establish mobile clinics, set up for a week at a time in those communities, and neighborhoods experiencing the outbreak.

The locations will be readily available on the Erie County website, and disseminated throughout the media.

Recently, I visited the COVID Unit at Allegheny Medical Center.

It was a humbling and profound experience.

Seeing the disease at its worst, and the frontline health workers who put themselves in harm's way every day.

At that same time, we're working to build up an infrastructure for treatment.

The health department obviously can't deliver complex medical treatment, and taxpayers can't be expected to pay for it, but it can ensure that patients are tested.

Triaged are handed off to the medical experts who know how to treat this illness.

At this time, supplies are limited, and only certain patients in high-risk categories are being prescribed treatment.

But I want to Erie County residents to understand something.

When it comes to this crisis, you are your own first responder.

In this pandemic, we all have a role to play.

It starts with putting on a mask when and where needed.

I don't believe in a government which wields the threat of mandates to force you to wear a mask.

Coercion is not governance, but common sense and compassion for others is a step in the right direction.

My administration has taken steps to end mandates, and to ask Erie County citizens to make the choices which are right for their families, but also to be respectful of the choices of their neighbors.

The federal government is now making high-quality mask available to every family.

Use them.

Wear them.

And I wanna add, that it does no good for those following the guidelines to depict those who aren't as villains.

We're all neighbors, we're all friends.

What works is encouragement, and a kind word.

We should aim to inspire our neighbors, not to continue the divide.

Likewise, the administration has made tens of millions of test kits available free in by mail to our citizens.

The website to order your tests is COVIDTests.gov Again, that's COVIDTests.gov The home testing will be up to each of you.

It is a first line of defense in breaking this chain of infection.

Testing facilities that we've established are also going to be available for those who don't have a test or in need of specific testing for travel, employment, or other reasons.

The treatment will be available from our regions, great hospital assets.

I know it is also my job as your County Executive to rebuild the trust between you and your county government.

It might seem hard to believe, but we're not always going to live in a perpetual state of quarantine and shutdowns.

No society can survive this way.

During the past two years, we've watched as over 30% of our small businesses have failed.

Just this past week, I was eating lunch at EDDC's new food hall.

And I noticed that Starbucks had closed.

A large national chain was unable to survive in downtown Erie during the greatest reconstruction effort in our history.

Our businesses will continue to flounder as the employees who once worked downtown supporting these businesses, continue to remain isolated, and working from home.

Another example is Erie Insurance has invested in over $150 million in their new building expansion, which remains vastly underutilized.

This is another example of how the COVID-19 pandemic has stifled our plans for growth, and continues to negatively impact our economy.

My administration, and Erie County government will lead the way in returning to normalcy, and breathing new life into our economy.

We have the resources.

We have the safety measures in place.

It is time for all of us to return to work in safely.

I encourage other local governments in our partners in the private sector to join us in supporting our community.

Supporting our local businesses, and begin our journey to a new, and safe normal.

Erie County is in an extraordinary place.

Carved out by pioneers.

Tempered by the fires of history.

And made prosperous by hardworking, honest people.

As the global economy came to dominate every market, we felt these effects, but I don't need to go into a history lesson of what Erie once was.

Nostalgia is not a basis for a policy for growth.

I have gone department-by-department, and thinking of ways to revive our economy, and encourage job creators to recognize the extraordinary assets that we have here.

Erie sits within a day's drive of half of the North American market.

We're two hours from three major cities.

We're near Canada, our nation's single biggest trade partner.

What we have not had is a coordinated effort with the many other entities that combined can concentrate efforts on growing the entire region's economy.

But as we flush out these details in the coming months, I can assure you that Erie County's future isn't determined solely inside its borders.

The world economy has taught us this.

I propose to connect with governments, and agencies across the region to see how we can build new jobs, attract new investment, and collaborate on ways to pool our resources, to include the American Relief Plan dollars.

People are ready to work together.

I can assure you that Erie with its location and population base will be at the forefront when it comes to reaping the benefits of a regional strategy.

Someone long ago once said, "That it's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't worry about who gets the credits."

Well, let's test that theory.

It will be the stated position of this administration that every policy, and action will be measured against whether it benefits the people of Erie County in the area of jobs, prosperity, but most importantly family.

My goal is to carry out the terms of my blueprint for Erie's come back.

This four pronged strategy.

It makes sense.

First, we aren't going to increase taxes and fees.

The best way to raise new revenue is to build a larger, more vibrant, and robust private sector economy.

And I asked for good partners in County Council for their cooperation in pursuing this goal.

We cannot tax our way into prosperity.

We need to build it from the ground up.

Second, we'll work on a coordinated program for business expansion and retention.

We can't afford to wait for someone to announce a plant closing to step in.

We need to keep track of what's here now, and how we can retain and help businesses build.

We can't sit here, and hope that the world just discovers us.

It's time for Erie County to market itself.

I referred to collaboration a bit earlier.

This is a key part of my strategy, not just in building our economy, but in how we work every single day.

We need to seek more public input on everything which we do, from how to spend pandemic rescue dollars, to where to focus our day-to-day efforts.

And the fourth prong is education.

The debate over whether we should open a community college has long since passed.

The people have spoken, due process has taken place, and we need to build a strong county college relationship.

I intend to fully support the community college, and I'm sure they in turn will work with the Office of the County Executive to make sure we are giving our young people first rate training for the workforce we plan to build on, on our way to greatness.

The wealth of talent, bounty of natural resources in the rich diversity of our region provide what I remain convinced is the best place in the entire Commonwealth, and I'm saying this in Erie during winter.

I've heard it said that Erie is a hard place to recruit to, and an even harder place to recruit from.

The people who come here discover what a wonderful place this truly is.

And the folks who live here, we already know.

We haven't suffered decline because of a fault in our people.

we've experienced what was at fault in how generations of politicians have taken their cues from Harrisburg, and Washington, DC.

When it's clear that Erie's challenges require Erie solutions.

This is what we need to do right now.

We need to come together, and talk about what solves problems, and what really helps people.

The solution and the people, are right here in Erie County.

And I'm humbled to serve them just as I'm humbled to serve each of you.

Thank you.

And may God bless you, your families and our nation.

Good evening.

[upbeat instrumental music]