Jason Svonavec | Why a Dirt Track in New Centerville Matters More Than It Looks
Jason Svonavec
On an event night at the New Centerville pulling track, the parking lot fills with trucks, the grandstands fill with families, and the local fire company gets something it badly needs: a venue that brings in revenue. Jason Svonavec of Somerset County invested in that track for both reasons at once.
He loves the sport. That part is no secret. His Pro Stock tractor, Bootlegger, competes in the Fendt High Stakes Series, and pulling has been part of his life for years.
But the track investment was never only about racing. It was about what a gathering place does for a town that has fewer of them every year.
Rural Communities Run on Volunteers
In small towns, the fire department is not a city service with a budget line and full-time staff. It is your neighbors. The man running an excavator on Monday is the same man pulling on turnout gear at two in the morning when a barn catches fire.
These departments survive on donations, fundraiser dinners, and whatever the community can spare. Equipment is expensive. Training is expensive. The money has to come from somewhere, and in places like Somerset County, it comes from people deciding the department matters.
The economics are brutal and simple. A set of turnout gear costs more than most families donate in five years, and a truck costs more than every club budget in town combined. Without steady revenue, departments make do with hand-me-down equipment long past its prime.
A pulling track that draws crowds gives the fire company a recurring engine for fundraising instead of a once-a-year chicken dinner. That is the kind of giving Svonavec believes in: not a check that disappears into an account, but an asset that keeps producing.
Skin in the Game Beats a Plaque on the Wall
There is a version of charity where a donor writes a check, gets photographed, and moves on. Svonavec has little interest in it. His view is that local investment works when the community is a participant, not a recipient.
His support for local schools follows the same logic. When the Rockwood library needed resources, he stepped in. When the Meyersdale Elementary playground needed upgrading, he helped make it happen. In each case, the point was a visible, usable improvement in the daily life of the town, not a name on a letterhead.
You can argue about big philanthropy and its layers of administration. What you cannot argue with is a playground full of kids or a fire hall with a new truck in the bay. Local money, spent locally, is accountable in a way that distant giving never is.
There is also a dignity in it that pure charity sometimes misses. A community that helped build its own fire hall owns that fire hall in every sense that matters. Nobody resents a gift they worked alongside.
Proximity Is the Whole Point
Why does this approach work? Because Svonavec is close enough to see the need before it becomes a crisis. He shops in these towns.
He employs people from them. He knows which institutions are one bad year away from trouble.
That proximity changes the math. A distant foundation funds categories. A neighbor funds the actual roof, the actual books, the actual track surface. Nothing gets lost in translation because there is no translation.
None of it requires wealth on any grand scale, either. It requires deciding that the place you live is worth maintaining, the same way anything else you depend on is worth maintaining.
Svonavec built his career in the equipment business starting in 1999, and as Operations Manager at Fearless Leasing he spends his days around contractors and tradespeople who hold these communities together. Supporting the places they live is not a side project to the business. It is the same work, carried past the property line.
The measure he comes back to is simple. Did you leave it better than you found it? A dirt track in New Centerville, a library shelf in Rockwood, a playground in Meyersdale.
Small answers, maybe. But they are answers, and they are local, and they are real.