On Tuesday, the McKean County Republican Committee held its annual spring event with a chicken barbecue at the McKean County fairgrounds.
State Treasurer Stacy Garrity made the trip from Harrisburg to give the keynote address. Also featured were state Rep. Martin Causer, R-Turtlepoint, and state Sen. Cris Dush, R-Brookville.
The idea behind the chicken barbecue is “basically just having a get-together so people can socialize and talk about politics,” said Richard Kallenborn, a member of the McKean County Republican Party’s executive committee and former county commissioner. He noted that people are “anxious to get out and talk.”
Kallenborn noted, “A lot of people felt the Republican Party was falling apart or demoralized,” but said that those sentiments are not true.
They planned to hold the event outside to make it safer for COVID-19 concerns, but it was moved into one of the buildings at the fairgrounds due to weather.
In opening, Ken Kane, committee chairperson, said he will be asking people to become more involved to help promote the party’s agenda.
“Last November, some people were extremely disappointed in the outcome,” said Kane. However, he said there was a positive: “McKean County had more Republican votes than ever before.”
In her talk, Garrity talked about why she felt it was important to make the trip from Harrisburg to McKean County on Tuesday, saying, “When people say that rural counties don’t matter, that is not true.”
Garrity, who is also from a rural area — Bradford County — told the group they can expect to see her a couple of times a year while she is in office.
She talked about initiatives on which she is working.
For one, starting July 1, she will “open the checkbook” by publicly posting how “every penny that wasn’t appropriated” was spent. According to Garrity, the government will send bills to the treasury to pay for health and human services knowing they will have to pay the bill, even if it wasn’t budgeted, thereby spending more than what was appropriated.
Another initiative is to return unclaimed property to Pennsylvanians.
According to Garrity, there is almost $5 million in unclaimed property in McKean County alone. People can visit patreasury.gov/unclaimedproperty to search for themselves.
She is working on a Keystone Saves program to make it easier for employees to save for retirement. The more people are able to save for retirement, the less they rely on taxpayers later on.
Garrity said she worked on a letter today in response to actions by the Biden administration with which she was not happy. She said they are asking banks to stop giving loans to certain industries, including the oil industry.
In talking about the industry, Kane said, “McKean County was built on oil, gas, timber, farming and agriculture and, most importantly, integrity of work.”
Meanwhile, Causer encouraged people to go out to vote not only to choose candidates, but also to cast a vote for questions that will appear on the ballot, two of which are related to the governor’s power during emergencies.
“We’ve got to take our government back,” he said. “We have a government who has been running by execution order for more than a year.”
In his own comments, Dush praised Garrity’s efforts.
“She’s doing a lot for transparency,” he said.
Dush also commended voters for choosing both a Republican treasurer and a Republican auditor general in Pennsylvania for the first time over 50 years.
