ZANESVILLE, OH — Today, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) visited Zanesville to push for Congress to pass the American Jobs Plan and make historic, much-needed investments in improving our nation’s infrastructure, affordable housing, school facilities, manufacturing and skills training, and more – all while creating good-paying American jobs. 

Brown believes we must invest in the people and the communities that make this country work. He’s pushing his colleagues in Congress to pass this proposal to create good-paying jobs that cannot be shipped overseas, while making historic infrastructure and jobs investments a reality.

“Communities across Ohio are struggling to afford expensive – yet vital – repairs to outdated infrastructure. We can to rebuild American infrastructure by putting Ohioans to work at good-paying jobs that cannot be shipped overseas. This is an investment in the Ohio towns, neighborhoods, and homes that have been overlooked by Washington and Wall Street for too long,” said Brown. 

Brown was joined by Don Mason, Mayor of Zanesville and member of the Mayors’ Partnership for Progress, and Lori Watiker, local resident and co-owner of Lionel Construction.

“The strength of the American Jobs Plan is that investing in infrastructure improves the quality of life for those living in our community and provides living wages and life skills, which will help workers support their family and loved ones,” said Mayor Mason. “The benefits of The American Jobs Plan is that construction workers immediately bring home living wages and those same workers additionally benefit in the long term by improving their job skills and value in the workplace.”

The American Jobs Plan contains several critical investments that would benefit Ohioans and their communities. The proposal would: 

Fix highways, rebuild bridges, and upgrade ports, airports and transit systems, by:

  • Modernizing 20,000 miles of highways, roads, and main-streets
  • Repairing the worst 10,000 smaller bridges, providing critical linkages to communities
  • Dedicating funds to support ambitious projects that have tangible benefits to the regional or national economy
  • Replacing thousands of buses and rail cars, repairing hundreds of stations, upgrading airports, and expanding transit and rail into new communities
  • Creating good manufacturing jobs by producing electric buses to replace 50,000 outdated public transit buses, and at least 20% of the nation’s school bus fleet 

Deliver clean drinking water, a renewed electric grid, and high-speed broadband to all Americans, by:

  • Eliminating lead pipes and service lines in our drinking water systems, improving the health of our country’s children and communities of color
  • Putting hundreds of thousands of people to work laying thousands of miles of transmission lines and capping hundreds of thousands of orphan oil and gas wells and abandoned mines
  • Bringing affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband to every American, including the more than 35 percent of rural Americans who lack access to broadband at minimally acceptable speeds 

Revitalize manufacturing, secure U.S. supply chains, invest in R&D, and train Americans for the jobs of the future, by:

  • Ensuring that the best, diverse minds in America are put to work creating the innovations of the future while creating hundreds of thousands of quality jobs today
  • Using strong “Buy America” requirements to ensure American workers build and make things in every part of the U.S., and they’re trained for well-paying, middle-class jobs
  • Expanding the manufacture of clean energy technology and electric vehicles to create jobs and fight climate change

Create good-quality jobs that pay prevailing wages in safe and healthy workplaces while ensuring workers have a free and fair choice to organize, join a union, and bargain collectively with their employers, by:

  • Ensuring that American taxpayers’ dollars benefit working families and their communities, and not multinational corporations or foreign governments
  • Requiring that goods and materials are made in America and shipped on U.S.-flag, U.S.-crewed vessels
  • Ensuring that Americans who have endured systemic discrimination and exclusion for generations finally have a fair shot at obtaining good paying jobs and being part of a union

Build, preserve, and retrofit more than two million homes and commercial buildings, modernize our nation’s schools and child care facilities, and upgrade veterans’ hospitals and federal buildings, by:

  • Building, rehabilitating, and retrofitting affordable, accessible, energy efficient, and resilient housing, commercial buildings, schools, and child care facilities all over the country, while also vastly improving our nation’s federal facilities, especially those that serve veterans

Solidify the infrastructure of our care economy by creating jobs and raising wages and benefits for essential home care workers, the majority of whom are women of color, by:

  • Making substantial investments in the infrastructure of our care economy by investing in our caregiving economy workers
  • Ensuring home and community-based care options for older adults and individuals with disabilities

 

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