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House Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
House of Representatives
Session of 2023 - 2024
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | May 10, 2023 03:41 PM |
|---|---|
| From: | Representative Clint Owlett |
| To: | All House members |
| Subject: | Dairy Investment Fund 2.0 |
| It happened again. We lost a $650 million investment and 250 new jobs to New York when Coca Cola announced this week they would skip Pennsylvania and build a new Fairlife milk processing facility just over the state line. If you remember last year, Act 108 of 2022 provided significant tools to ensure our hard-working dairy farmers would have a shot at an opportunity like this. However, once again, we have lost out to a neighboring state. http://Coca-Cola to build $650M facility in Monroe County (spectrumlocalnews.com) Our farmers were excited about this initiative and are looking for opportunities to turn our dairy industry around. I have been receiving calls this week from our dairy farmers asking what went wrong, and what are we going to do now. Could regulatory reform be part of it? Investing in our dairy industry must be a priority this year considering this loss to New York. That's why I'll be introducing legislation to invest $25 million into the Dairy Investment Program that we created in 2019 to make strategic investments of state funding that would help stabilize and grow the industry. If you would like to learn more about that fund and exactly how it has benefited our dairy farmers, it's Act 38 of 2019, available here: http://2019 Act 38 (state.pa.us) If you haven't already, I hope you will also join me in co-sponsoring Rep. John Lawrence's package of bills to support our dairy farmers. The co-sponsor memo for those bills was issued on Jan. 4. In the meantime, I sure hope we can turn this ship around and put out the welcome mat for large investments like this one. No one likes to lose and let's face it, this was a huge loss for the Commonwealth. |