[naviga:h3]Cheer [/naviga:h3]

Labor Day weekend 2017 in Butler got a little more interesting earlier this week, when city council members approved a contract which will bring an Italian festival to town for a four-day stretch.

The festival, Little Italy Days, is expected to shut down Main Street each day, and organizers hope it will draw as many as 30,000 people into town.

Yes, there is a cost associated with the event; public services will be working overtime. But that’s a reasonable trade-off when you consider that the festival amounts to a unique opportunity to show off this town’s great shops and its family-friendly character.

The effects of these cultural events — the Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival, the Walldogs mural paintings, and Little Italy Days, just to name a few — are a compound thing. They build off one another and can be transformative, if we embrace them.

[naviga:h3]Jeer [/naviga:h3]

More bad news for state employees in Pennsylvania: Moody’s Investors Service said Thursday that it expects the state-run pension system’s funding gap to hit $1.7 trillion, after dismal investment returns for the funds were reported this year.

According to the Moody’s report, Pennsylvania is among five states which, by themselves, account for more than half of the nation’s total pension liabilities. Last year a study by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators pegged Pennsylvania as having the second most underfunded pension plan in the country (New Jersey had the worst-funded plan). What a tremendously irresponsible state of affairs.

Closing that gap will mean making the kind of difficult, politically unpopular decisions — higher taxes, diverting money from other areas of the budget — which have time and again proven beyond the capabilities of our lackluster General Assembly. Which is ironic, given that this is a problem created entirely by state lawmakers, who spent a dozen years contributing only half of what actuaries said was required to properly fund the system.

Thanks to cuts to benefits enacted in 2010, Pennsylvania now has one of the least generous public pension plans in the country. You’d hardly know that, listening to legislators’ hem-hawing over the problem as if the state had been bilked out of a fiscally sound position by fund managers and union contracts.

No, ladies and gentlemen. This is your own mess, and it won’t clean itself up.

[naviga:h3]Cheer [/naviga:h3]

Breast cancer is a terrible disease, but it often brings out the best in those who rally around those battling for their lives. Just so with Riding for a Cure, a nonprofit awareness effort which raised and donated nearly $50,000 to two foundations that focus on helping local cancer patients with treatment expenses.

The group donated $34,000 to the Butler Health System Foundation, which funds the Butler Breast Cancer and Women’s Cancer Support Group, and $15,000 to the Richard G. Laube Cancer Center at ACMH Hospital in Kittaning.

Nearly 200 bicyclists rode in the July 30 event, which took riders from Rock Ann Haven on Greenwood Drive to a pig roast at the Longhorn Corral.

It can be easy to forget that these events directly touch the lives of cancer patients throughout the region. Without the goodwill of these riders and the people who give of their time to organize and host the events themselves, the struggles of cancer patients would be more difficult.