In the News

U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright’s greatest expectation of his new hire, state Sen. John Blake, is simple: produce jobs.

Blake, D-22, Archbald, will resign his Senate seat March 8, the day he starts working as Cartwright’s new district director with an emphasis on economic development. They formally announced the moves at a joint news conference Monday at the former Oppenheim Building in downtown Scranton.

“There are those who say the best social program is a job,” Cartwright, D-8, Moosic, said. “And I’m one of them. And John Blake is another one. This is a remarkable opportunity for us in Northeastern Pennsylvania to put John Blake to work doing economic development. Economic development is a $50 phrase: it means more jobs.”

The job description for Blake and his decades of government-based economic development experience includes finding worthy ways to spend all the federal money Cartwright promises to bring home in his new House post. Late last month, Cartwright, a House Appropriations Committee member, took over as chairman of the committee’s Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee, which oversees more than $70 billion in federal spending.

Blake, 60, first elected to the Senate in 2010, said Sunday he grew weary of sitting in a Senate where Democrats always sat in the minority, which thwarted their many legislative hopes. That and the ongoing health struggles of his wife Louise convinced him he wants to work closer to home. He already planned to retire from the Senate next year. He first talked to Cartwright shortly after the November election about working for President Joe Biden’s administration, but then Cartwright brought up the district director post.

With Cartwright’s growing influence in Washington, D.C., he can do more for the region “than I can do in the minority in Harrisburg,” Blake said during the news conference. “It’s really about that, because that’s what my life has been about.”

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