James Bralski thinks Hermitage, where he lives, is doing just fine, and doesn't see a need for it to consider a consolidation with four other Shenango Valley municipalities.

But when two experts on regionalism recommended Monday that all five municipalities consolidate, Bralski asked them what incentive the city could have to do so.

Bralski didn't like the answer he got.

"I don't like the way they picked on Hermitage," agreed Hermitage Commissioner James "Pat" White.

But Hermitage resident Robert Jazwinski, a citizen representative of the Shenango Valley Intergovernmental Study Committee, said Mercer County's demographics support the conclusions David Rusk and John Powell made.

"I don't think it was a low blow," said Jazwinski, a former Hermitage commissioner.

Rusk said Hermitage's ability to attract people and business and residential development only looks good when compared to Sharon and Farrell.

"I know folks in Hermitage feel that they're doing pretty well," Rusk said. "But they aren't doing so well compared to the larger competitive world in which they function. This whole region is lacking. Hermitage is lacking with it.

"One of the issues is how do you attract new people and new investment in the community," Rusk continued. "A great deal of Hermitage's growth is through the transfer of businesses that already exist in the region from the old communities to Hermitage."

Rusk, a consultant on urban and suburban issues and former New Mexico politician, noted that Goldstein Furniture Co. abandoned downtown Sharon for Hermitage.

"That's fine for Hermitage," he said. "It's a disaster for Sharon. That resource, jobs, moved out of the Sharon box and into the Hermitage box. But for the region as a whole, is it progress?"

Powell, law professor and founder and executive director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota School of Law, said Hermitage is not attracting the kind of new people on which a community can be built.

"Hermitage, the one community that appeared to grow at all: 5 percent growth from 15,000 to 16,000," Powell said. "And where did most of the growth take place? From people who are on the other side of 55."

Communities are built on people in the 20s and 30s, who are having families, Powell said.

"The 24- to 34-year-olds are leaving. The people that Hermitage is getting to come to Hermitage are people who retired, and part of it's for tax reasons. You're just shuffling people around."

Rusk said the aging population has skewed the significance of Sharon Regional Health System and UPMC Horizon emerging as major employers.

"Your hospitals, they may be your largest local employers," Rusk said. "It strikes us that your hospitals are largely serving your own local and increasingly larger older population."

The hospitals are not "major magnets for people seeking specialized health care from across the country," such as the Cleveland Clinic, Rusk said.

Another citizen, questioning comments that Mercer County is a very racially and economically segregated area, said he has seen blacks and foreign nationals moving into the nicer sections of Hermitage.

"The policy of analysis by anecdote is bad social science," Powell responded. "When you look at the data, this area tends to be much more segregated than Charlotte."

The Charlotte, N.C., area has reduced segregation, Powell and Rusk said, agreeing that the problem has not been eliminated there.

White said local race and drug problems have gotten worse since major employers left town in the '80s.

"The best thing to solve problems for those people is to give them good jobs," he said of minorities.

Bralski said he was particularly turned off by Rusk's assertion that Hermitage isn't anything special.

"I've driven several times up and down Route 62," Rusk said. "When you've seen one Pizza Hut, you've seen them all. When you've seen one Jiffy Lube, you've seen them all. Hermitage is a nice community, but there's nothing distinctive about it. I can find you 10,000 Hermitages in this country."

Bralski said he complained to the Shenango Valley Initiative, which presented the forum featuring Rusk and Powell, for inviting two men who "denounced what Hermitage has accomplished."

Bralski, a critic of the local merger-consolidation study being undertaken by Farrell, Sharon, Hermitage, Sharpsville and Wheatland, said he will not support anything that calls for big government.

He said solutions in local problems can be brought about by advocates such as Olive Brown of the Minority Health Center and the ERASE anti-drug coalition, and Michael Wright of the Community Food Warehouse.

White criticized Rusk's and Powell's predictions that Hermitage will lose its vibrancy because of the problems of its neighboring communities.

"I think Hermitage, in the long run, is going to be the savior of the whole valley," said White, who also called himself an opponent of bigger government.

He touted the potential of the fledgling Gateway Commerce Park on Route 18, which he said will attract firms such as high-tech companies and drug companies.

"That is going to provide jobs for people in Sharon, Farrell, Sharpsville and the rest of the community," he said.

White said Hermitage's growth has been controlled and has been the result of "tough, good decisions" over 20 years.

Hermitage is still mostly farmland, he added, pointing to its potential for more growth.

Powell said an economic boom like that of the '90s will not to be seen again for another 50 or 60 years, a notion that Jazwinski agreed with,

"I think the folks in Hermitage need to look back to the '80s, when there were many vacant store fronts," Jazwinski said.

He noted earlier this month in a presentation to the committee that the county population is declining and aging, and family income is not keeping up with state averages.

"Hermitage is only going to prosper in the long term if the region prospers," said Jazwinski, who fears the local housing market has slowed.

The demographic trends he has seen "do not portend well for the future," he said.

You can e-mail Herald Staff Writer Joe Pinchot at

jpinchot@sharon-herald.com