Twenty-nine counties in Pennsylvania will get help with snow removal costs, but Mercer County is not on the list.

The money is coming from federal disaster funds and was designated after President Bush issued an emergency declaration last week. The declaration covers counties with record and near-record snowfalls from the storm that hit between Feb. 14 and 19.

Jim Thompson, director of the Mercer County Emergency Management Agency, said the county "didn't even come in the ballpark" of the amount of snow needed to get federal funding based on the criteria.

"Unbelievable" was Sharon Mayor David O. Ryan's reaction to hearing that there would be no relief money for Mercer County.

"How much more snow did anybody have than us?" he asked. "Everybody around here expended their salt budgets, overspent their budgets, and that isn't good enough to declare us a disaster area?"

Ryan said this situation reminds him of the November tornado when Clark wasn't declared a disaster area despite the large amount of damage.

"We're being discriminated against in this area, we have been for years, and it's continuing to go on," Ryan said. He said all of the money stays in the eastern part of the state, and the government has got to address this part of the state.

Ryan said he's not saying that there wasn't a lot of snow in eastern Pennsylvania, but a lot of it came from one storm. In Mercer County it snowed consistently all winter, causing problems for street crews and budgets, "and yet we're overlooked," he said.

Local government agencies in the designated counties will be reimbursed for 75 percent of the total eligible costs of equipment, contracts and personal overtime related to emergency services in dealing with snow over a 48-hour period, according to a news release from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.