‘The Old Ones Are Dying Off and the Young Ones Leave Us’ : Little Coal-Country Town Running Out of Youth, Taxes, Time

Tired old Jacksonville is running out of coal, youth, taxes and time.

Hanging on with only about 60 residents, caught between decreasing tax revenues and increasing state pressure to install sewers, the Borough Council has begun to talk about disbanding and casting Jacksonville’s nearly square-mile of territory to the mercy of neighboring townships.

“If we go another five or 10 years, no one is going to be here anymore,” said Councilman Stanley Gryczuk, 77, a retired miner and butcher.

“The old ones are dying off and the young ones leave us,” said Councilwoman Mary Grimm, 81, a retired cook.

Not as Big as Saltsburg

Jacksonville, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, was never as big as nearby Saltsburg. But plentiful coal and hard work kept it on the map, its young folks close and its future hopeful.

With neat frame houses scattered along a hillside, it boasted as many as 150 residents in the 1930s, mostly coal miners and their families, and even a bank, barber, butcher, blacksmith and railroad station.

“It was the quietest, nicest town you’d ever want to see,” said Jacob Grimm, 84, Mary Grimm’s husband, a retired miner and himself a councilman “for, oh, about 30 years.”

Council members say there are fewer people willing, or able, to govern.

Mayor Tom Salva, in his 60s, has been too ill to attend a council meeting in two years.

“We don’t expect him to come to the meetings. We bring things to him,” Mary Grimm said. “In the last election, we were trying to get someone new to be the mayor, but no one would run, so we just wrote Tom in.”

The average age of the council members, including the Grimms and Gryczuk, is 71 1/2 years, without counting young Frank Stango.

Stango, 21, a business major at nearby Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was recruited for the council several years ago by his mother, Councilwoman Josephine Stango, 56, a part-time postal worker.

Councilman Adam Gordish, a retired coal miner, is 75 years old. His son-in-law, Robert Yatzkanic, 56, is also a councilman. Delores Yatzkanic, Gordish’s daughter and Yatzkanic’s wife, is borough secretary.

GOP Landmarks

Almost everyone is a Democrat. Mary Grimm said there are six Republicans and she can give directions to each of their houses.

Townsfolk say Yatzkanic, an X-ray technician at a nearby Westinghouse Electric Corp. plant, is one of the half-dozen or so people in Jacksonville still working.

“Everybody’s retired,” Mary Grimm said. “We have more widows in town than anyone else. The young people grow up, go to school and then they leave.”

The council also expects young Stango to leave town one of these days. It recently won permission from a Common Pleas Court judge to allow it to eventually reduce its numbers from seven to five members.

“Jacksonville’s as big as it’s going to get,” Stango said with a shrug. “Unless something comes this way, I don’t see any reason for anyone to move in.”

The borough has no property, no municipal building and no equipment of its own. The council pays $10 to meet once a month in a classroom at the United Presbyterian Church about halfway up Mill Street.

Delores Yatzkanic estimated the borough’s annual budget at about $19,000, mostly to keep water in a few fire hydrants, street lights illuminated and Mill Street and a few side roads repaired and plowed.

“We didn’t have to name our side streets until we got ambulance service,” Mary Grimm said.

The borough pays a man with a pickup truck $45 to plow and sand the streets whenever it snows.

State Demanded $700 a Year

Council members were shocked when a state agency said Jacksonville must contribute $700 a year for unemployment insurance for the trucker and the borough’s part-time attorney.

They are angry that state or Indiana County officials often charge the borough the same standard governmental fees paid by larger communities, such as Indiana, the county seat of about 16,000 people.

Most public tasks, such as patching a municipal road, are too small for local contractors to bother with, Gryczuk said. Bigger projects would jolt the municipal budget and the taxpayers.

“We have to wait three or four years to accumulate enough money to get a road fixed,” Gryczuk said.

Council members also are worried about a potential financial knockout--a longstanding demand by the state Department of Environmental Resources that Jacksonville install a sewer system to replace septic tanks.

Sewer Charges

Josephine Stango said the latest estimates put the cost for sewers at about $40 per month for each homeowner, mostly for interest on the capital expenditure.

She said the borough doesn’t have the money for engineering studies for the sewer project. Mary Grimm said most residents can’t afford sewers anyway.

At the Golden Pheasant tavern on the two-lane state highway, owner Eddie Sklar, himself a former councilman, worried that new talk of disbanding the municipality may cost him his liquor license eventually.

“This is my livelihood,” he said. “I don’t want to lose it.”

Sklar suggested that the borough can save money by asking homeowners to pay for the street lights near their homes and by asking neighboring townships to run their plows down Mill Street occasionally.

He said council members should have installed sewers years ago, when costs would have been less.

Sklar was instrumental in getting an oil driller to sink the community’s water well just outside the borough line for free.

Acknowledges Difficulty

But he concedes that running a little town is difficult. When he was a councilman more than a decade ago, for example, he recalls that the borough received $180 in revenue-sharing money, but had to spend $144 on a required newspaper advertisement to describe publicly how the money would be spent.

Josephine Stango said officials are reluctant to break up the borough, which was founded in 1853 and named after President Andrew Jackson.

“We would never disband if it would hurt anybody,” she said.

Still, with an eye on lowering taxes and benefiting from ample road equipment in neighboring municipalities, council members say they are considering overtures to officials of adjacent Black Lick and Young townships.

“But who would take us?” Mary Grimm said. “We don’t know.”