This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

14 years is a long time to wait for clean drinking water, as Dimock Township residents – who’ve relied on bottled water for nearly a generation, due to fracking contamination – can tell you. So they were heartened at this week’s news that Pennsylvania American Water Company is completing a new pipeline that will bring fresh, potable water to local faucets by late 2026.

Borough meetings usually truck in such quotidian matters as sewer rates and street signs. But on Monday, Tioga resident Dora Cole showed up to commend Borough Manager DJ Warriner for a loftier achievement: saving a neighbor’s life. When Cole’s fellow food pantry volunteer didn’t show up for a recent shift, she alerted Warriner, who discovered the missing man on the floor, felled by a major cardiac event. According to Cole, Warriner stayed by the patient’s side until an ambulance rescued him.

Several Pennsylvanians were nominated recently to White House roles. They include Robert Gleason, tapped to lead the Amtrak Board of Directors; Jovan ‘John’ Jovanovic, nominated for president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States; David Metcalf, the president’s pick as the next United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania; and Sean Plankey, nominated as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Sexual harassment allegations made against Mike Vereb, a former aide to Gov. Josh Shapiro, continue to dog the Shapiro administration. New reporting from conservative outlet Broad + Liberty this week found that the governor’s office was unable to locate a week’s worth of emails sent and received by a deputy aide to Vereb who accused him of harassment 2023. The story drew the attention of state Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, who has criticized Shapiro over his handling of the allegations against Vereb. “The ‘most transparent administration’ just LOST a week’s worth of key emails in a sexual harassment case. How convenient,” she wrote in a post on X, adding: “Pennsylvanians aren’t buying it.”

A former McKeesport police captain is facing charges after officials say he stole more than $260,000 from his department’s evidence room, according to WPXI and TribLive. Christopher Halaszynski, who was the evidence room custodian for the police department, allegedly stole $260,280.27 in cash over four years and used the funds to pay his bills and vacation costs. Even the custodian can’t pull off a clean heist.

Lancaster County voters at a Tuesday candidates’ forum missed out on the opportunity to hear from the Republican candidate for state Senate. Parsons, a county commissioner running to replace Sen. Ryan Aument in a special election, declined to face his two opponents, Democrat Andrew Malone and Libertarian Zachary Moore, at the event. That prompted Carolyn Hernandez, president of the League of Women Voters of Lancaster County – which hosted the forum – to decry another example of “candidates refusing to face their opponents in public” ... which she called “damaging to democracy.”