PITTSBURGH — On Friday afternoon, President Joe Biden saw firsthand the work and technology that is created inside a Carnegie Mellon University facility.
“Generations ago, Mill 19 used to roll out 10-inch steel bars. Now it rolls out the latest in manufacturing, robotics, simply rolling out the future,” Biden said.
That manufacturing success is what brought the president to Pittsburgh. His goal to build a better America includes bringing jobs and plants back home. He told the crowd at Mill 19 on Friday that Pennsylvania will see those jobs with the investment into infrastructure.
“We are giving state and local leaders historic funding to make national projects real. Here in Pennsylvania, that means $1.6 billion for bridges alone,” Biden said.
The president said the state will see $327 million of that funding in 2022. He believes it couldn’t come at a better time, after the tragedy in Point Breeze on the morning of his visit.
“We’ve got to get on with it; we’ve got to get a move. The next time we don’t need headlines that someone was killed in the bridge collapse,” Biden said.
It’s not just the president who acknowledges a need for change. The governor also addressed this, after it was announced that more than 3,000 other bridges in our state are listed in the same condition.
“It could have been prevented, had we done what we’d done, what we are doing here — investing in manufacturing, investing in our infrastructure, we would have been more productive, and bridges like that would not have fallen down,” Gov. Tom Wolf said.
As of now, the state has not yet released which bridges will be the first to benefit in 2022 from this infrastructure bill.
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