You might never know that council is wrestling with a potential 23 percent tax hike if you had attended last night's council meeting, or are lucky enough to see it on PCTV.
That's because it was hardly mentioned.
"I want to know what they are doing about the budget, not about murals," one resident told this reporter.
He had a point.
At this point, the budget is being handled in the finance committee, whose meetings are public, but whose schedule is difficult to find on the borough web site.
And all we learned about that Wednesday night is that Council President Dan Weand asked Vice President Sheryl Miller to resign from it. He said he had heard from constituents that because she is not running for reelection, she will not have to live with the consequences of the recommendations it makes to council.
Miller, not one to take such affronts lying down, refused and said her constituents had urged her to stay on and noted that if Weand loses the election in November, he should also immediately step down from the committee given he also will not have to live with the consequences as a council member, just as a taxpayer like Miller.
"Sounds right," said Weand, who later told a reporter that as council president, he has the right to appoint or remove committee members at will, and he was trying to be polite. He declined to say .
All of which makes for lovely gossip and an eye into the power politics and priorities of some of our council members, but does little to close a $2 million budget gap.
To be fair, there were some ideas floated. Miller is still pushing for a professional review of borough operations and salaries and said a new borough manager should not be chosen until that review -- on which no one else has agreed -- is finished.
She said the finance department needs to keep a better eye on trends, like health care costs and dropping property assessments, and plan accordingly, and then added that first responders should not be cut. It is perhaps relevant here to mention that the police department consumes more than half the borough's general fund.
Kind of hard to have a serious discussion about the budget when the first thing you do is take half of it off the table for discussion.
And Mayor Sharon Thomas suggested that rather than hire a new borough manager, that Assistant Borough Manager Justin Keller be promoted and do both his and Flanders' job for the same salary.
If Pottstown holds to its usual course, having predicted doom, a final budget which contains a tax hike, but a smaller one, will be presented to council in November as a fait accompli -- most likely AFTER the election -- with little time for discussion or innovation.
But with three of four council seats un-opposed, why would anything change?
And, because this is Pottstown, we talked more about murals.
Sigh.
But there was a good idea floated by a resident, Lisa Mueller. She was responding to the notion that a third party can be assigned the maintenance responsibility for a mural which has been the sticking point from the beginning for a particular property owner.
And she suggested that perhaps the borough could form a public arts council that would vet mural proposals as well as take responsibility for maintenance.
That actually sounds like a pretty great idea, so long as we can avoid the usual Pottstown tendency to let WHO gets chosen devolve into a pissing contest.
And with that, I present to you, The Tweets:
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