(File Photo of Police Lights)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Hopewell Township, PA) Pennsylvania State Police in Beaver report that an Aliquippa woman was charged after causing a single-vehicle crash on the off ramp of the Aliquippa exit on I-376 West on January 3rd, 2025. At 8:35 p.m., thirty-one-year-old Jacquelyn Harris of Aliquippa did not have control of her vehicle and it rolled over after hitting a guide rail. Harris was charged by police after the incident.

(File Photo of Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Badge)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Bridgewater Borough, PA) Pennsylvania State Police in Beaver report that a two-vehicle crash occurred on Market Street in Bridgewater Borough on January 25th, 2025. According to police, at around 11:15 p.m., an unidentified driver hit his car into another car that was parked legally and then proceeded north on Market Street. No charges were filed by police after the incident.

(File Photo of State Representative Roman Kozak)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Harrisburg, PA) According to a release from State Representative Roman Kozak’s office, Kozak made a statement after Governor Josh Shapiro unveiled his budget priorities for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. According to Kozak, the taxes on energy the governor suggested will stretch the budget of working families. Kozak also suggested an idea that outlined limiting spending and the cutting of both taxes and corporate welfare.

(File Photo of Police Lights)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Hopewell Township, PA) Pennsylvania State Police in Beaver report that a man from Midland was charged after a two-vehicle crash on I-376 East on January 20th, 2025. At 4:54 a.m., thirty-one-year-old Johnathan Shepler of Midland did not have control of his car near Bryson Road. Twenty-five-year-old Ryan Hottenfeller of Rochester hit Shepler’s car after Shepler went in front of Hottenfeller trying to pass him. Shepler was charged by police after the incident.

(File Photo of State Representative Rob Matzie)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Harrisburg, PA) According to a release from State Representative Rob Matzie’s office, the Pennsylvania House adopted a resolution from Matzie to increase public awareness about the dangers of rheumatoid arthritis. The bill known as House Resolution 16 made a designation that February 2nd, 2025 was “Rheumatoid Arthritis Day” in Pennsylvania. According to Matzie, people with rheumatoid arthritis have an estimated chance of a fifty to seventy percent higher risk to have cardiovascular disease than the general population.

(File Photo: Source for Photo: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro delivers his budget address for the 2025-26 fiscal year to a joint session of the state House and Senate at the Capitol, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025, in Harrisburg, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro will seek more money for underfunded public schools and public transit in his budget proposal unveiled Tuesday, while he hopes to win support for legalizing marijuana and introducing taxes on skill games viewed as competitors to casinos and lottery contests.

The Democrat — a rising star in the party who is seen as a potential 2028 White House contender — is also seeking more money for universities, offering hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to encourage new power plant construction and relying on billions in surplus cash to balance spending.

To help unveil it, Shapiro delivered a budget speech to a joint session of the General Assembly in the state House of Representatives’ chamber in which he touted his efforts to help Pennsylvania’s economy compete with other states. He urged lawmakers to be willing to invest the state’s surplus cash.

“Pennsylvania is on the rise and we are not gonna stop,” Shapiro said during a 90-minute speech to lawmakers. “You see, we have the resources we need to make smart investments now and to maintain a responsible balance in reserve.”

Anything that passes will have to get through a divided Legislature, with the House controlled by Democrats and the Senate by Republicans. The plan drew applause from Democrats — House Speaker Joanna McClinton, D-Philadelphia, called it a “bold plan from a visionary” — but the scale of the spending increase faces strong resistance from Republicans who say it’ll drive Pennsylvania into a fiscal ditch that will eventually require tax increases.

Shapiro’s spending plan breaks $50 billion for the first time

Shapiro’s proposal tops $50 billion for a state budget in Pennsylvania for the first time, requesting $51.5 billion for the 2025-2026 fiscal year beginning July 1 as Shapiro gears up for his re-election campaign.

Shapiro’s hands are tied to a great extent, bound by a huge increase in costs for the medical and long-term care for the poor, as well as a slow-growing economy and a shrinking workforce that is delivering relatively meager gains in tax collections.

All told, Shapiro’s spending request would increase total authorized spending by 9% through the state’s main bank account, or about $3.8 billion, including a $230 million supplemental request for the current year’s spending.

Of that, more than $2 billion would go to toward human services, primarily to meet the rising cost of medical care for the poor, and an extra $800 million would go toward K-12 schools and higher education institutions, including Penn State, Temple, Pitt and state-owned system schools.

Most of the new education money — $526 million — is viewed as part of a multiyear, multibillion-dollar response to a court decision that found that Pennsylvania’s system of public school funding violates the constitutional rights of students in the poorest districts.

The plan needs surplus cash and new sources of money to balance

The budget proposal holds the line on personal income and sales tax rates, the state’s two largest sources of income. But it instead uses about $4.5 billion in reserve cash to balance — the second straight year of multibillion-dollar deficits.

Tax collections are projected to increase by $2.3 billion to $48.3 billion, or 5%, but a large portion of that rests on whether lawmakers will go along with several proposals by Shapiro.

That includes raising almost $1.2 billion from legalizing adult-use marijuana, expanding how the corporate net income tax is applied and introducing taxes on the skill games that are increasingly cropping up in bars, pizzerias, convenience stores and standalone parlors.

Still, lawyers for the schools that sued the state were asking for much more than Shapiro is proposing, while nursing home operators, home-care providers and counties that maintain mental health networks were also hoping for substantial increases in aid that they didn’t get.

Elsewhere in the plan, Shapiro is proposing to send nearly $300 million more, or about 20% more, to public transit agencies as he works to stave off cutbacks by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, the Philadelphia region’s public transit agency struggling to regain ridership lost during the pandemic.

Shapiro wants lawmakers to approve the tax credits to fast-track the construction of big power plants in Pennsylvania amid an energy crunch that threatens to raise electricity bills across Pennsylvania, the nation’s second-biggest natural gas-producing state.

The plan also seeks to shave reimbursements to cyber charter schools, saving nearly $400 million in payments by public schools, and close two state prisons, with the state’s 24 prisons at about 82% capacity.

The union that represents prison staff, the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association, swiftly said that it will fight the closures, saying closing two prisons will endanger officers and inmates.

Shapiro does have a cushion of about $10.5 billion in reserve, thanks to federal COVID-19 relief and inflation-juiced tax collections over the past few years. Shapiro’s proposal would leave about $6.4 billion of that unspent.

This year’s $47.6 billion spending plan required about $3 billion of surplus cash to balance, eliciting warnings from Republicans that the state must slow the pace of spending or risk depleting its surplus within several years. Republicans suggested that Shapiro’s plan ignored the reality of fast-widening deficits and lacked good ideas to improve the state’s sluggish economy.

“When you have to govern, you have to make hard decisions,” Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, said in a news conference.

House Appropriations Chairman Jordan Harris, D-Philadelphia, said that if Republicans don’t want to use the state’s surplus then they should explain what they’ll cut.

“Ask them who they’re willing to turn away, ask them who they’re willing to turn down, ask them which of the most vulnerable Pennsylvanians don’t deserve this medicine,” Harris told reporters.

(File Photo: Source for Photo: President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

(AP) President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Wednesday designed to prevent people who were biologically assigned male at birth from participating in women’s or girls’ sporting events.

The order, which Trump is expected to sign at an afternoon ceremony, marks another aggressive shift by the president’s second administration in the way the federal government deals with transgender people and their rights.

The president put out a sweeping order on his first day in office last month that called for the federal government to define sex as only male or female and for that to be reflected on official documents such as passports and in policies such as federal prison assignments.

Trump found during the campaign that his pledge to “keep men out of women’s sports” resonated beyond the usual party lines. More than half the voters surveyed by AP VoteCast said support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far.

He leaned into the rhetoric before the election, pledging to get rid of the “transgender insanity,” though his campaign offered little in the way of details.

Wednesday’s order — which coincides with National Girls and Women in Sports Day — will involve how his administration will interpret Title IX, the law best known for its role in pursuing gender equity in athletics and preventing sexual harassment on campuses.

“This executive order restores fairness, upholds Title IX’s original intent, and defends the rights of female athletes who have worked their whole lives to compete at the highest levels,” said U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina.

Every administration has the authority to issue its own interpretations of the landmark legislation. The last two presidential administrations — including Trump’s first — offer a glimpse at the push-pull involved.

Betsy DeVos, the education secretary during Trump’s first term, issued a Title IX policy in 2020 that narrowed the definition of sexual harassment and required colleges to investigate claims only if they’re reported to certain officials.

The Biden administration rolled back that policy last April with one of its own that stipulated the rights of LGBTQ+ students would be protected by federal law and provided new safeguards for victims of campus sexual assault. The policy stopped short of explicitly addressing transgender athletes. Still, more than a half-dozen Republican-led states immediately challenged the new rule in court.

“All Trump has to say is, ‘We are going to read the regulation traditionally,’” said Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School.

How this order could affect the transgender athlete population — a number that is incredibly difficult to pin down — is uncertain.

The Associated Press reported in 2021 that in many cases, the states introducing a ban on transgender athletes could not cite instances where their participation was an issue. When Utah state legislators overrode a veto by Gov. Spencer Cox in 2022, the state had only one transgender girl playing in K-12 sports who would be affected by the ban. It did not regulate participation for transgender boys.

“This is a solution looking for a problem,” Cheryl Cooky, a professor at Purdue University who studies the intersection of gender, sports, media and culture, told the AP after Trump was elected.

Yet the actual number of transgender athletes seems to be almost immaterial. Any case of a transgender female athlete competing — or even believed to be competing — draws outsized attention, from Lia Thomas swimming for the University of Pennsylvania to the recently completed season of the San Jose State volleyball team.