Council seeks to reduce budget
POTTSTOWN » Following up on a pledge made last month to reopen the 2018 budget and try to reduce 12-percent tax hike it contains, Borough Council President Dan Weand has appointed a seven-member ad hoc committee to look for ways to save money.
The committee includes Weand, Councilman Joe Kirkland, who will head the group, along with Councilman Dennis Arms,
who voted against the $54.4 million budget.
Also included in the group are Finance Director Janice Lee and Utilities Director Brent Wagner.
Weand also included two people who described as “outsiders,” who are not members of the staff or council.
One is David Renn, a member of the Pottstown Borough Authority, and the other is James Smock, a former Pottstown School Board member who heads up the West-Mont Christian Academy in North Coventry and who, Weand said, has experience with “very tight budgets.”
Kirkland questioned Monday why, as the person in charge of the committee, he had “no say” in who would be on it, but Weand insisted that appointing committees is a power vested with the president of council.
Councilwoman Rita Paez, who was among members of council insisting last month that more time was needed to try to cut the tax hike, said the committee should have minority members. Weand replied he might try to add them later.
According to the borough code, council has until Feb. 15 to re-open the budget and try to reduce the tax rate, either by raising
revenues or cutting costs.
The direction Weand seems to be aiming at can perhaps be discerned from the name he gave the team — the Ad Hoc Cost Reduction Task Committee.
During public comment, council also heard Monday night from from Steven Kambic, executive director of Petra Community Housing and a resident of the North End.
He told council that “Pottstown’s current budget dilemma has been years in the making, high tax rates continue the trend of declining property values and declining assessment. To reverse this cycle of disinvestment we must create a clear break with the past and provide a realistic vision for community renewal.”
He suggested several steps including a community renewal task force with local players like the hospital, health and wellness foundation, The Hill School, council and school board.
Kambic also said the final 2018 budget should have a tax hike of “less than 5 percent,” and include a commitment of zero tax hike for 2019.
“We can reverse the trend and see a much brighter future,” Kambic said.
Council also voted to implement the Early Intervention Program sponsoted by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development.
The study has a value of $80,000, and the borough will cough up $16,000.
The state will help identify and hire an outside consultant to conduct a financial and operational audit of the borough with an eye toward cutting costs and aligning revenues with expenditures.
Pottstown went through this process in 2009 after laying off 13 employees in 2008.
The eventual report to come out of that effort contained the startling prediction that unless Pottstown radically changed the way its borough and authority government is run, that borough property taxes would jump by 75 percent;
water rates by 25 percent and sewer rates by 19 percent in the next five years, years now in the past.
Property tax millage in 2009 was 5.2 mills and the report, conducted by Ohiobased Management Partners, warned it could jump as high as 9.08 mills unless something was done.
The millage in the budget adopted last month is 11.58 mills.
In 2009, Management Partners’s 141-page report concluded the borough’s primary problem was the continued erosion of the borough’s property values and the assessment challenges which follow — a problem Weand said repeatedly last year and repeated last week could not have been predicted.
The 2009 report contained 122 recommendations, several of which the borough administration implemented, designed to save $370,000 a year.
Among the more radical of these, was a suggestion to merge the public works department and the borough authority, eliminate the position of public works director and eliminate the communications and dispatch arm of the police department.
None of these recommendations were adopted, although the dispatch arm of the police department was reduced in this year’s budget, due perhaps to the Montgomery County takeover of all emergency dispatching.