Last week’s Borough Council meeting brought us good news, bad news and worse news.
Good news: No property tax increase.
Bad news: It will still cost more to live in Jenkintown.
Worse news: No property tax decrease.
Rick Bunker, social media bully and council member, proudly announced that the 2018 budget will contain no property tax increase, but trash collection will cost more and parking fees will double.
The worse news that you still won’t find a tax decrease comes mostly as a result of Deborrah Sines-Pancoe’s Gang of Twelve’s tone-deaf attitude that such a thing can never happen.
Case in point, Council approved a resolution suggested by the aforementioned councilor to donate $700 to buy T-shirts for a well-meaning, but municipally irrelevant cause with no discussion. Rick Bunker in the blink of an eye made a motion to donate 700 dollars from Borough funds. Seconded, and then unanimously approved.
Anticipating the “But it’s only $700!”, argument, please re-read this post that argues it’s not the money, it’s the attitude. This organization could more readily raise that and more through its own GoFundMe campaign, but why go through the trouble when a simple plea to Council entrusted with our tax dollars renders a check fired off on a whim. The Borough will buy T-shirts, but they won’t fix their sidewalks.
Pocket Albatross Park
Your taxes also won’t go down because the Borough must now deal with a flooding problem on Cedar Street. According to our own engineer, remediation could cost upwards of $900,000 — or the equivalent of one pocket park.
Remember also that the Borough must soon chip in for sewer repairs, a tab that they must cover with borrowed money coming from a lending market seeing increasing interest rates. That will cost about two pocket parks.
Speaking of taxes, the Borough also awarded the tax collection contract to a new company called eCollect. At the last meeting, the owner of the company gave a rather lackluster presentation, and couldn’t quite recall the exact number of employees he had. “Approximately thirteen,” he replied. In committee Rick Bunker claimed to have check references, but the minutes did not mention names.
This might be a good point to remind readers that our borough solicitor Sean Kilkenny currently finds himself under investigation by the FBI for his association with a pay-to-play scandal involving Allentown’s mayor and Northeast Revenue Services, a tax collection firm headquartered in Wilkes-Barre. Allentown was Kilkenny’s client.
Record retention policy upheld
Also of note from the last meeting, Council also approved Rick Bunker’s resolution to continue adhering to the state’s records retention guidelines. Rick all-but-wanted to let this pass unnoticed, however for anyone concerned about the Borough’s record on transparency, this is actually a big deal.
The state’s records retention guidelines, approved in 2006, come from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. One of these guidelines allows the Borough to destroy its digital recordings of the minutes as soon as the Borough commits them to paper and approves them — or one month. In 2006, most municipalities probably recorded their meetings on tape, which makes archiving and organizing this record burdensome. However, today the mp3 file of a Borough meetings is only about 140 megabytes large. In other words, one thumb drive could store about five years worth of meetings.
Why bother? Well, why not? The Borough need not use its own hardware. Archive.org readily and easily stores all digital media from anyone free of charge.
The guidelines also allow the Borough to destroy all emails when it determines they no longer have any official value. Given the Borough’s fight to prevent us from reviewing them upon request, I’m sure they’re relieved about that. Bet Hillary Clinton wished she worked here.
Speaking of transparency, the Borough posted its 2017 budget on their website as a PDF graphic. This implies that someone in Borough Hall printed out the Excel spreadsheet to paper, scanned the 60-plus pages back into a PDF document, and then posted it online. They could have more easily generated the PDF directly from the spreadsheet, saving the Borough considerable time and cost. Unfortunately their method produced a document that prevents the viewer from selecting the embedded text. There’s no excuse for this incompetence.