Jeff Hammer announces run for Johnstown mayor, touts 'certain skill set'
Feb. 19—Jeff Hammer has spent the past four decades involved in multiple fields, including business, finance, education, nonprofit and energy, which has enabled him to work across the region, state, country and even the world.
He is now looking to enter municipal government.
Earlier this week, Hammer announced he is running in the 2021 Democratic Party primary for Johnstown mayor, looking to unseat incumbent Frank Janakovic.
Hammer is a current director of sales for Transparent Energy, which procures third-party energy for retail customers.
His background includes graduating from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and completing a 4 1/2-year, 40-credit, graduate-level certificate of special studies in business administration and management from Harvard Business School's Executive Education program. He has also taught at Duquesne University's Palumbo — Donahue School of Business.
Recently, Hammer has been Johnstown's food distribution coordinator for the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and St. Vincent de Paul Family Kitchen, helping provide approximately 1,000 boxes of food a month to those in need.
"I feel like I have a skill set that's unique," Hammer said. "There are a lot of very, very nice people in Johnstown. I think the current leaders of Johnstown, I think they're very nice. Being very nice is a wonderful thing. It's a great thing.
"But you also need to have the skill set. And I've been lucky a lot of my life. Quite frankly, I think I've just been lucky. I've been lucky to go to IUP, to study at the University of Salzburg at Austria, to graduate from Harvard University, to work for the Kennedy family, to be in the energy industry for 38 years.
"I've just been fortunate to develop a certain skill set that a lot of people — or most people — in Johnstown don't have. That doesn't make me smarter than anybody in Johnstown because I'm not smarter than anybody in Johnstown. But what it does make me is that it's blessed me with — I think — a unique skill set that I can apply to do things in Johnstown that, maybe, others can't.
"I just want to use that skill set to the best of my ability, and really to the ability and to the benefit of the residents of Johnstown."
Some of his points of emphasis for Johnstown are creating jobs and small business development, reducing crime and drugs, redesigning the city's pension plan, eliminating blight at a faster pace, building a sense of community and restructuring the Johnstown Redevelopment Authority.
When talking about the challenges facing Johnstown, including population loss and being one of the poorest cities in the nation, Hammer said: "I think the cure for that is jobs. I think that jobs will cure a lot of that. I think less violence will cure a lot of that, too. People are pretty tired of the crime in Johnstown. You get rid of the crime, you get some jobs, some decent jobs, that's how the city's going to turn around."
Hammer lived in Johnstown's Oakhurst Homes housing project when he was born, before moving to Richland Township and then graduating from Ferndale Area High School.
He currently rents a residential unit in Old Conemaugh Borough while also owning homes in Fox Chapel near Pittsburgh and on Lake Erie. The Cambria County Election Office confirmed Hammer voted in Johnstown elections as a legal resident in 2019 and 2020.
"In every way, shape and form, I am a Johnstowner," Hammer said. "In terms of where I spend most of my time, in a non-COVID world, for the past two or three decades, I travel 60 or 70 days a year anyway because of my job. My job involves a lot of face-to-face meetings, so wherever I live I'm going to travel. Right now, I'm spending most of my time in Pittsburgh. I do spend a fair amount of time in Johnstown."
Hammer added: "If I get elected, obviously I'm going to be spending the vast majority of my time in Johnstown, and I have no problem with that."
