Stacy Garrity Jobs Environment Pennsylvania

Stacy Garrity's Company Cut Its Towanda Workforce From About 950 to 500. She Was Helping Run Its Czech Plant at the Time.

Garrity's whole pitch for governor is her 34 years in business at Global Tungsten & Powders. Spotlight PA found that during her years as a director there, the Bradford County plant shed roughly half its workforce while she helped run the company's facility in the Czech Republic.

MAGA Report Cards · Sep 03, 2026

Stacy Garrity's Company Cut Its Towanda Workforce From About 950 to 500. She Was Helping Run Its Czech Plant at the Time.

Stacy Garrity has built her campaign for Pennsylvania governor on one story: she is not a career politician, she is a businesswoman. Her campaign website walks voters through her climb from accountant at Global Tungsten & Powders to becoming one of the first women ever made vice president there.

It is a good story. It leaves out what happened to the people who worked in the plant.

About 950 jobs in 2012. About 500 in 2019.

Spotlight PA reported in August that while Garrity was a director at Global Tungsten & Powders, the company "cut the workforce at its Towanda plant from around 950 employees in 2012 to roughly 500 in 2019 through multiple rounds of layoffs."

That is roughly half the jobs at one of the biggest employers in Bradford County, gone in seven years.

By 2010, Garrity was named director of sales and marketing. Spotlight PA reports that she "also helped run the company's facility in Bruntál, Czech Republic, though she did not live there," and that the job had her traveling around the world frequently, as recently as 2019.

So the years when Towanda was losing half its jobs are the same years she was helping run the operation overseas. American Journal News reported that the company was expanding its foreign workforce over that period, including at the Czech plant, and that it bought a Finnish facility in 2015 that Garrity says she helped negotiate.

Nobody has produced a document showing Garrity personally ordered a layoff. That is not the point. She is the one telling voters her record at this company qualifies her to run Pennsylvania's economy. If the years count as experience, they count as a record.

The lobbying she did without registering as a lobbyist

Garrity's last title at the company was vice president of government affairs. That job was lobbying, and she was good at it.

WHYY reported in April that she managed hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying for the company. She pushed for a 25% tariff on Chinese tungsten. She helped win a provision in the 2019 defense bill that barred the Pentagon from buying tungsten from China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. In 2020 the company landed a $4.2 million Defense Department grant. The company also had a registered lobbyist on contract at $10,000 a month starting in 2012.

Garrity never registered as a lobbyist herself. Her campaign spokesman, Matt Beynon, told WHYY she "never crossed the requisite threshold to register as lobbyist on behalf of the company."

Spotlight PA put the incentive plainly: Garrity has downplayed her role in the policy win — arguably her biggest private-sector accomplishment — "to avert the potential negative perception that she did not formally register as a lobbyist."

That is the shape of it. She wants credit for the work when she is describing her résumé and distance from it when someone asks why she never filed the paperwork.

The plant's environmental record

The company Garrity spent 34 years at has an enforcement file.

In 2020, the Towanda plant landed on a list of the country's top 100 "super polluters," a study by the Environmental Integrity Project and the United Church of Christ that ranked facilities by toxic air emissions in populated areas. It came in at number 96, on emissions reported for 2018.

Four years earlier, the EPA had gone after the plant for a chemical release. The federal consent agreement lays out what happened. At 4:30 in the morning on January 26, 2015, a pressure valve lifted and the plant vented an estimated 213 pounds of anhydrous ammonia into the air. Federal law requires a plant to tell the state emergency commission immediately when it releases more than 100 pounds of the stuff, because it is on the government's list of extremely hazardous substances.

The company never told the state. It called the federal hotline about four and a half hours later. EPA assessed a civil penalty of $22,281.

The rest of the pitch

Garrity's business-experience argument has been showing wear all year, and this is not the first crack in it:

The Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council endorsed her in 2024 and is now campaigning against her, and her campaign won't say whether she would sign a right-to-work bill.
She spent two years arguing Pennsylvania should cut regulations to attract data centers, then called for a "pause" she won't put a length on.
Her Treasury office rejected a records request that would have shown whether she did a favor for donors.

She still holds a paid seat on the board of ECM, an insurance company — a position The Philadelphia Inquirer reported could pay her six figures on top of her salary as state treasurer.

What the record shows

Stacy Garrity is running for governor on 34 years at Global Tungsten & Powders. During her years as a director there, the company's Towanda plant went from about 950 workers to about 500 while she helped run its facility in the Czech Republic and the company expanded its foreign workforce. She spent years lobbying for the company without ever registering as a lobbyist. And the plant she rose through was fined $22,281 for failing to tell the state it had released 213 pounds of an extremely hazardous gas.