Murals, Manager Search But Little Budget Talk

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:

No Tax Hike, Acting Super in Pottstown Schools

Stephen Rodriguez

Two remarkable things happened in the most unlikely of places last night.

Decisions were made in the administration building meeting room.

(OK, that was a little snarky, but I will confess that both did take me by surprise.)

First, the Pottstown School Board's finance committee endorsed a $59.7 million budget for 2016-2017 that will not raise taxes.

I'll let that sink in for a moment.

That's two years in a row with no tax increase.

In Pottstown.

And, perhaps even more surprising, the board's personnel committee not only endorsed the idea of making Human Resources Director Stephen Rodriguez the acting superintendent of the district, it also endorsed the final pieces of the administrative re-organization that it had questioned just a two months ago.

The first was made possible primarily by an unprecedented drop, that's right I said DROP, in health insurance costs worth close to $1 million in savings.

The other piece of news is primarily a function of time.

The school board apparently has been unable to find a superintendent candidate to its liking.

As a result, with the end of the school year fast approaching (Superintendent Jeff Sparagana leaves at the end of June), the board had to put someone in charge.

Also, the board's primary objection to enacting the administrative re-organization plan which, to my understanding adds two new positions to the administration, was that they thought the new superintendent should be allowed to have input into that re-organization.

With the clock run-out on that consideration, that objection becomes moot. And now the primary supporter of the plan was its primary objector -- board member Thomas Hylton.

As a result, what the personnel committee endorsed is making Stephen Rodriguez  the acting superintendent given that he is one of the few people within the district who is eligible and hiring someone from outside the district would be expensive.

Rodriguez told the committee members he does not want, nor is he ready, to be the full-time superintendent, he just wants a guarantee of a job when a new super is finally picked.

As a result, the committee endorsed Sparagana's suggestion that a new human resources manager be hired as soon as possible and, when a new superintendent is selected, that Rodriguez be all-but guaranteed the post of "assistant to the superintendent."

"Every number one loves a number two who does not want to be number one," Rodriguez said.

With the hiring of a new Information Technology director and the shift of positions for LaTanya White, who will take on pupil services as well as her current alternative education job, the only post in Sparagana's re-organization plan left unfilled is director of special education, a post Rodriguez said he is working hard to fill.

All of this remains just a recommendation until the full board votes on it, but with the endorsement of six board members in attendance, it would seem a majority exists to put both plans into action.

That's as much as you get for today. Let's remember I was supposed to be out sick today (I did manage to cough on a few committee members).

For a deeper dive this news, you will, as always, have to read The Mercury.

Here are the Tweets from last night.

Is a Pottstown School Tax Hike Pending?

What's more fun than attending three Pottstown School Board committee meetings? Having a two-hour executive session right in the middle of it all of course.

One nice thing about the Pottstown School Board scheduling the facilities, personnel and finance committee meetings all on the same night is, its all on the same night.

So last night, my Twitter followers learned about some great bids for masonry work around the district, work on replacing the flat roof on the administration building and, most importantly, a first look at the 2016-17 school budget.

Work on the administration building flat room has already begun.

Given the chaos of the state budget process in Harrisburg, which continues as I write this, Business Manager Linda Adams gave her "best guess" about where state aid will land for the budget year we're still in.

What the picture will look like for the budget year she has started to plan for is anybody's guess.

Nevertheless, something are known at this point.

The preliminary $59,583,669 proposed budget for 2016-17 calls for spending almost $2.5 million more than the $57,136,928 2015-16 budget.

And of that increase, more than half that increase -- $1.6 million to be close to exact -- is due to salary and PSERS (retirement) increases. PSERS by itself is $1 million more.

Add in the fact that Gov. Tom Wolf's proposed budget had called for a charter school tuition reimbursement of more than $700,000 which the budget finally adopted in March did not include and next year's cannot be expected to include.

Another more local cause is the continuing collapse of Pottstown's property tax base. Assessment challenges in Pottstown -- more numerous than anywhere else in Montgomery County -- will strip another $393,000 off the revenue side of the balance sheet in 2016-17, said Adams.

And while an increase of more tan $200,000 is expected in state funds for the basic education subsidy, losses in special education funding and vocational education funding for the state leave Pottstown at a $70,723 loss in the state aid column, no matter what the headlines and state officials running for reelection may tell you.

The good news is that ultimately, this preliminary budget look only sees a $155,696 shortfall.

The bad news is that number only gets reached with an infusion of nearly $1 million in new local taxes, a 1.3345 mill tax hike, or 3.4 percent, the maximum allowed by the state index.

School Board President Andrew Kefer, who is also the chair of the joint personnel and finance committee, made it pretty clear that there is little appetite on the board for a tax hike of that size.

Board member Polly Weand expressed the hope that the borough-wide LERTA tax break the borough and school district are working together to implement will help to ultimately reverse the decline in assessed property values.

Let's hope she's right.

Here are the Tweets from the evening.