With 12 years of experience as a legislator for the 60th state House District, Republican Jeff Pyle said his focus hasn’t changed. It’s still increasing jobs and reforming taxes.

“I feel we’re horribly overregulated, and it holds us back,” he said.

Pyle said federal regulations are preventing jobs from being available in the 60th District, which spans portions of Armstrong and Indiana counties as well as Buffalo Township and Winfield Township in Butler County.

“(President) Reagan said it best: Government’s job shouldn’t be getting rid of jobs, and, right now, that’s hammering our region,” Pyle said. “We can work our federal delegation to roll back some of these silly regulations.”

In addition to calling for the return of dredging in the Allegheny River, Pyle wants to see the Clean Air Act standards altered since they are “literally unattainable by any science or technology on earth.”

Pyle said his district includes 1,400 coal worker families that were laid off and another 800 steel worker families, so he’s also calling for lessened federal regulations on coal-fired electricity.

“We need our feds to go a little easier on coal-fired electric, which is cheap and consistent,” he said. “What’s really scary is that coal and steel go hand in hand, and alternative energies can just not generate the wattage our industrial users demand.” Pyle will be calling for the incentivization for the gas industry, which he also hopes will not be overregulated.

“(The gas industry) is going to be a huge employer in our future. What we need to do is incentivize uses of that gas,” he said.

But having jobs also leads to increased community “health,” Pyle said.

“If you’ve got jobs a lot of your other problems are solved, crime goes down, drug use goes down,” he said.

Aside from Pyle’s focus on jobs, he has been holding out for keeping taxes down, he said.

“We’re going to hold the line on taxes,” Pyle said. “Governor Tom Wolf’s proposed tax hike would’ve equaled all other 50 states combined, and I was one of the guys that held out. You can expect more of that behavior.”

Pyle believes that property taxes should be left behind, in favor of income and sales taxes.

“We have to get away from property (taxes). I favor a hybrid of income and sales tax, and that’s what I’m going to push.

“I’d rather see it become a more consumptive tax and sales tax base rather than flat income, but it’s got to be a balance of the two. Governor Tom Corbett said it best: We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.”

In addition, Pyle wants to see the corporate income tax rate lowered because he called it one of the highest on the East Coast. Currently, the corporate income tax rate is 9.99 percent in Pennsylvania.

“(The corporate tax rate) makes it hard to compete. If we lowered that a couple of points, it would put us on par with Ohio, Maryland. We have to make it attractive for businesses to come here,” he said, stressing that this could bring jobs back to the state.

Aside from jobs and taxes, Pyle put in a lot of time and energy toward addressing the opioid addiction problem in his district and statewide, he said.

“I don’t know how anybody (talking about the most important issues) cannot address opioids,” Pyle said. “It’s pandemic.”

In the 2007-08 House session, Pyle sponsored legislation that would make drug delivery resulting in death a first-degree felony, which is now the case in Pennsylvania.

“Now the judges have a charge they can sentence on,” he said.

Opioid addiction is a marker that a town is in trouble, Pyle said, often following large layoffs and significant unemployment.

“I’ve seen the decline of a town due to unemployment and the social downrange that occurs is often the lead edge of crime,” Pyle said. “It starts with break-ins and robberies, and somewhere in there, somebody’s going to start moving heroin because it’s cheap, easy and you can make money off it. The correlation between money and crime is pretty well known. The drugs move in because people are desperate for money, and it’s destroying families. It all comes back to an employment sector that will take you in.”

Before being a state legislator, Pyle was the mayor of Ford City for two years after being a high school teacher in the Armstrong School District. Pyle graduated from West Virginia University in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and received his bachelor’s degree in social studies from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1991.