library and started dating it was a long held high school back then small ringgold and then i went on to a clarion and graduated with a business degree and minored in economic and marketing and that's the field  you selected to go into well i spent most of my life in the insurance and the investment business i still have done many different things within the industry and the have kind of made that my home and my life's work that's right well you're involved in the community also you are for a period of time in charge of the washington city mission is that correct well i do a lot of charity work and for my church and also  business has made that a kind of a goal of ours to really give back to the community in ways that we have received in this community been very good to us but at one point in time when the city mission  was early without a director and their resources were very low and they needed really that can kind of revision everything i served about nine months in an interim capacity and actually help them find the executive  e is really very confident and doing an excellent job and they have some really strong goals for the mission and they are a veteran but they're planning on building a home for better veterans and it's about  million dollar project that they're looking at so it's a great place because they take care of the homeless they take the people they do all the things that we probably each of us should do a little bit more of but they make those things happen there yeah it's a it's amazing i've had the opportunity to be involved with them a couple times and it's a very heartwarming when you go down there and see the work that they do no it is the work really done well but their staff continues to get better and the people that work there are more more more talented all all the time and i just think that the work that they're going to they're doing is going to expand it even be greater than it has been in the past ok well but you have been in the political arena also ok i want to get a little history on that well in one thousand nine hundred three i was watchin the george bush run his reelection effort on t v and i think i rolled up my socks and threw it at the t v and said i can do a better job than that and now my wife says she didn't say this but i clearly heard her say that why don't so i the next day i get up called then representative santorum and said i'm thinking about running for office and we had lunch the next day and encourage me to do it and started the about a four year campaign to be the congressman from this area i did win both primaries and lost both general elections but as a great experience one of the highlights of my life was running for the united states house representatives it is much more tasking than anybody would ever believe even even for the position you're looking for know why i think that experience of having run a rigorous campaign and knowing  everything that's involved in the campaign is going to be very helpful on the big ronald reagan fan he has a poem that he light called the bullfighter and he says the poem goes something like bull fight critics packed in rows fill the arenas for all but there is only one who really knows and that's the one that fights the bull so i've fought the bull before and while many people think they know how to run for office there are many components to it and i think those four years of experience are going to pay off for me now one of the nice things about western pennsylvania and for a short period of time i was the chairman of the washington republican party a lot of the nice things that i found going around washington county is that  the difference between democrats and republicans aren't they great that's correct we have a very very very large percentage of reagan democrats who believe in conservative ideas government should be there to help you not to you know to run your life they should be there to protect you not to take over your income and things like that so you know this is this is a good place for a person with conservative ideas to in fact me well western pennsylvania has a high work ethic i've been involved in hiring people in different parts of the country and we always look for somebody from western pennsylvania because that worth of work ethic i think is inbred in all of us whether republican or democrat my mother or my my mother was a waitress my dad sold cars my father in law worked in el import mill for forty some years each and every person used their gifts to work to earn a living to make things happen take care of their family and nobody really was relying on the government to do much for them and so i think that's a common thing that we have in this area is that conservative and not just philosophy but attitude towards living absolute towards working on this it's funny you say that because i was talking to a friend who has a real estate firm down in texas and she was telling me that they were in charge of the reo program one of the homes went for foreclosure try to resell them and she said that she was interesting in finding the statistics in the pittsburgh area has absolutely one of the very lowest foreclosure rates because people laugh at us for the pro gays in the polling bill and everything else but as that ethnic background in fact did share those you know you are young businesspeople starting out the program starting new restaurants and everything else here that are taking pittsburgh back into the national spotlight still relatively low crime we have great colleges and universities we have wonderful sports arts ar bad i mean we really have a lot here locally housing is so relatively low cost compared to some of the other places throughout the country which probably is one reason why we lose as many houses that wasn't as volatile for us here but but all those things that go to make a great community i think are present in western pennsylvania and in washington county and particularly here in the peters township what are some of the issues that you're going to be looking at in your campaign well i like to talk about what i'm running for not just when i'm running against so there are a lot of issues i think that face us as a community that has been blessed in some ways and a community that in other ways is really suffering it's almost like we have the tale of two cities we have places like peterson places like south point west of route one thousand that are doing extremely well and so that prosperity needs to be preserved in the right way we need to make sure that we keep the business environment for the companies that are in that part of our community their taxes down regulations down we need to allow them to earn profits and to reinvest those profits in a way that is productive and not going to our state and our federal governments and so we have a battle there to kind of protect and preserve our pride our prosperity in other last dozen years we've actually seen positive growth rates but in those areas we've seen the opposite we see if we look into dinora in charlotte where they don't even really have a major food place  food market the last shop and save or whatever it was moved out here not too long ago they don't have a giant eagle they don't have a place where they can actually go to the grocery store believe it or not an end in or has very little impact on the banking system credit unions which helped my father back after world war war world war two get started in life to provide him with a loan because they believed he had worked and with paid pay his bill those kind of things don't even exist anymore in a place where they could they could use a lending hand and businesses have a hard time getting capital so in those areas i actually we're putting  together some things i think you'd find interesting we have a list of about twenty five things that we're going to do in my first one hundred days so we're actually committing in writing all those things that you're asking me about what are we going to do once we get in there so it's quite a couple different categories one is that we're looking for a high performing government we're looking for a high performing economy and then we're looking for the establishment of high ethical standards to undergird all of that along with the development of the continued development with a good standard of living a good quality of life for all of the citizens so you know it's on to really support what you're saying i had the opportunity to be in the movie the silence of the lambs i was a guard in that movie and jonathan demi was looking to shoot another movie in pittsburgh so he sent his people ought to do a time to piece time into the one nine hundred thirty s and so the next day they were back and we were having lunch and all of a sudden he's asking them questions and they're all sitting at the table laughing and he says well you know what's going to cost us a change of place they said about thirty nine dollars a so what are you talking about he said but thirty nine dollars because it's a small town called brownsville that hasn't changed since the thirty's and it's mostly shut down so we can do anything we  it is so for so that being my hometown and my home area there is a special place in my heart to do something meaningful there again what we will do there is totally different than what we're going to be doing  south florida although we're hoping that what has happening in south florida can help us as a guideline if nothing else for something i'm calling the mon valley twenty twenty vision i'm hoping to get elected in the year two thousand and sixteen four year term takes me to twenty twenty and i'm hoping to have laid out for the voters ahead of time what we're planning on doing in all the other areas particularly the mon valley step by step that we need to get that economy going again in a place where you have chronic unemployment and very little resources and things have been stagnant for so long it's not going to be an easy task but it can be done if you're a sports fan in pittsburgh we know that it can be done we had a losing baseball team for nineteen years and what happened somebody comes in and says that's enough of that we're going to start winning we're going to bring some people in that are going to change things and we've seen that change happen right before our very eyes so in my campaign material you often see the words new people new ideas and new energy not just talking about in the courthouse i'm talking about in aspects where we really clearly to make a change it probably isn't going to be government that makes the change it's that somebody in those towns decides that they're going to lead the way that they're going to be the one upon which the future is going to be built then we can take the limited resources we can take the what makes the town unique its history one long ally has the whiskey rebellion as part of his history and there certainly is a many many ideas that can be worked around that we also need to men have mentors from places that are growing our talk to the south point chamber of commerce event love t help them along a hell of chamber of commerce get up and moving get up and running but we need somebody there to make that decision it's not something the government government can mandate it's cut kind of got to happen from the grassroots up but you know government can only do so much you know i remember how many years south point sat there vacant and until the private industry actually took hold of it and basically in the last fifteen years it became the thriving area that it is today where now i am at one time everybody kept saying why are you building these big roads in intersections no one uses them and now all of a sudden they're coming out with the road south of you why in the other more intersections that seem put in the cuz it's it's probably the the main center  in washington county right and pennsylvania maybe and most of the united states and in some ways but you know that seventy percent of the business is that are in south are not related to miss marcellus shell so the other thing is that people think that's all marcellus shell related and so it's geography that makes a difference it's really not it's a fact that people over there are diversifying they're adding to the business mix that they have over there and yes they are bigger companies we've got them on valley that's going to be the same thing is going to happen but it is really going to be more small business oriented instead of the larger businesses but small businesses is really the place where most jobs are created maybe those small businesses are servicing the larger businesses and southpoint and maybe that synergy can make it a really good for everybody well i'll tell you right now i had a was one of my graduate programs was geography and regional planning yes cal you ok and we went out into the community and looked around we took little field trips and things from time to time and the key is it's a really neat place and what it has to be is once again it has someone get out own doldrums right you know you it's hard to have whatever people have been down for so long it's hard to give them a raw raw speech and have them pick themselves up by their boots and this is whenever i believe government has the opportunity to make a difference by adding some of that that seed money to in fact make this thing happen fix the roads fix the lights fix that make people start to see something positive in their community and then they can start spending a little money fixing up their storefronts and things and i think main street development is a big part of that and but it does take that old entrepreneurial experience and energy and somebody new saying well let me just set this way i'm an investment business everybody wants to invest in the markets at its peak nobody wants to invest in the markets at its bottom the best time to invest is when the market sort of bottom so maybe the one good thing that we can say about the valley is there is about as close to the bottom as you can be they don't want to be there and maybe it's a great time for us to make an investment in the mon valley while you're jumping into the political situation in washington county that in fact we are now facing reassessment which is going to well it depends upon you who you talk to is going to hurt some of the communities it's going to help some of them i don't know what it's going to do to peter stanton here we're not sure yet some of the you know there's homes here in the township that i sold to people back in the seventy's that the taxes really didn't change and they're paying one fifth of the homes in the other side of the township so i'm sure that there's going to be a difference we have a governor now who wants to take the monies from the oil and gas industry that are the impact fees that are given to the communities that are affected and want to spread that out to the communities i believe that has more with the teachers union or philadelphia than it does with the impacted areas in western pennsylvania if they take that money and shifted over to that side of the state that's not impacted by drilling that in fact we lose it so you know helping that is not going to help us at all so that's you know if you're going to be into some major questions whenever it comes to you know how the how the money's spent you know we have an opportunity with the meadowlands with the gambling with the casinos with the oil the counties getting some money ok now it's what they're going to do with it and how they're going to benefit all of the people not just some peter sonship get some money from the taxes we pay but we pay the largest percentage of taxes of any community out of the fourteen school districts in the county we pay the largest percentage and i've heard up to fifty percent of the counties taxes come from peters township you know it's hard to keep spending whenever you see just a little bit of that coming back here even though yes it's true peter science of is probably one of the better financially set communities out of washington county but one experience i believe that may not show up on my resume that i will be very helpful is i am in the investment business and i run an investment company i have many of my advisors that know more about financial planning than i do but i run the company it's a whole different mindset the set of activities and one of the things i'm responsible for are the compliance and meeting the regulatory issues of our industry so we are audited continually maybe we didn't help the people that bernie madoff ripped off but because of him our compliance and regulatory the laws of effective have increased significantly so every year we are audited every year we are audited by our what's called a broker dealer every year we're audited by finra and we can be audited by the state at any point in time they can knock on our door come in with a sop word on and open up our books and all that to them i never have to worry about me an audit because we do everything right all the time we do everything in the light of day we don't do anything under the table or that we're ashamed of or that we're hiding and so because of that we have the freedom of knowing that an auditor walks in it's really good so one of the things i'd like to do whenever i get into office is to start to conduct some audits not because i'm suspecting that anything is wrong  things are being done improperly but because those that if we're striving to have the highest ethical standards accounting and responsibility are two big parts of it so i won't mind seeing us do an energy audit of all the facilities that are in in the in the county i don't know about you but my heating bill keeps going up so i can only imagine what's happening across the county we want to make sure that we're using our energy efficiently and maybe changing lights or any number of things can help us to save a huge amount of money but i would like to do an energy audit i would also like to do a safety and security audit i know this as we come into this facility now there's a certain rules and regulations in place for getting in in the building and coming out of the building not really sure that's happening in every place in the county as we would want it to be so we're going to have a safety and security summit and we're going to we're going to bring people who are in charge of physical facilities or large numbers of people together and make sure that we are protecting ourselves in the way that we should be protecting whether it's like alice or analysis program or something else well explain just really alice because our teachers are going through their program right now and we're going to be bring down i believe in total level all making the students aware of it too well one of the things that you should always do whether in business or in government or in education is you should be vigilant ok that you should do things because they're the right things to do not do them out of fear or out of concern or any other emotion but we're when we have responsibility to watch over kids or whatever young men and women that we should be vigilant part of vigilant means that we should be prepared there's an old saying it's better to work in preparation rather than to work in desperation so if you're prepared then you don't have to face desperation alice has a program where institutions practice and rehearse and prepare for the unfortunate incident where you'd have an active shooter on site or you would have the security of everybody that's involved in the building threatened so it's kind of a dress rehearsal if you will like a fire alarm would prepare you for an actual event not that you're expecting it or not that you ever want to happen but you always want to be prepared so that it doesn't happen the preparation is what keeps it from happening as much as anything and so it is difficult sometimes but i guess a simple but it's not easy to do well we live in a very sad changing times of our society where we have to worry about those kind of things we do and we're also in a in the on top of one of the major support sources of energy in the world and so we would be a little bit naive to believe that we're going to have free access to that without any events happening so we should also prepare for that as well mike we're coming to the end of the program already and like oh yes i'm getting is going to go like explain to the would appreciate everybody support i really do want to be a county commissioner i have a vision of a growing and a prosperous county one that has high employment high employment not just here but all parts of the county and one where we have safe and secure communities and also one where we have healthy and clean environment so i believe that my experience as a business person professional and the personal values i have will enable us to make those things happen and i'm looking forward to using my gifts to help washington county move into the future when might we have we didn't go into a lot of the things  associations with religious groups here in the community as well as other values of your just mentioned we'll get them on the next i'd love to come back all right mike thank you very very very nice to have you here once again thank you very much and we'll look forward to the next time with talking politics in western pennsylvania