McClure says Northampton shortchanged

County exec threatens to cut funding to LANTA, Lehigh Valley Planning Commission

Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure has put two of the Lehigh Valley’s public institutions on notice, calling on County Council to cut funding to the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission and LANTA unless perceived inequities are addressed.

By McClure’s telling, the two organizations have treated Northampton County as a second-class citizen compared with Lehigh County, which he says receives more of their services. The two counties equally fund the two groups. If Northampton County doesn’t receive its fair share, the county should consider reducing the combined $1.1 million it provides to the organizations, he said.

“If we put half the money into an organization, Northampton County taxpayers should expect to get half of the services,” McClure said.

On its face, the data appears to back up McClure’s complaints. More money will be

dedicated to highway and bridge projects in Lehigh County over the next four years, and the best available numbers from LANTA show it spends more in Lehigh County. But county partners including PennDOT, Lehigh County and others say McClure is missing the bigger picture. Transit needs ignore the county line, and improvements to public transit and the highway network benefit everyone, officials say. Current spending and priorities don’t necessarily reflect the historic spending and priorities of the past either, they said.

“We’re doing this as the Lehigh Valley. It shouldn’t matter what side of the border you’re on,” said Hanover Township, Northampton County, Supervisor John Diacogiannis, who served as a volunteer on the Planning Commission for 18 years until McClure decided not to reappoint him in January.

As a county executive, McClure wields significant power to challenge those decisions, and if he can sway Northampton County Council, he can threaten two organizations vital to the region’s long-term health. LANTA, the Lehigh Valley’s transportation authority, uses county money to buy buses and run routes that poor and disabled residents rely on every day. The Northampton County subsidy to the Planning Commission pays the salaries of staff who advise municipalities on zoning and planning policies for development, transportation and infrastructure.

It’s a battle McClure has waged before. As a county councilman in 2010, he discussed eliminating the county’s hotel tax, a critical source of funding for the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp., another quasi-governmental organization that receives money from both counties. LVEDC leadership focused too heavily on promoting Lehigh County, he said, and Northampton County taxpayers had little to show for it. During his State of Northampton County Address in March, McClure credited current LVEDC Executive Director Don Cunningham for putting more focus on Northampton County even as he alluded to his recent complaints.

“If you are being treated unequally, you must not worship at the altar of regionalism. You must push back,” McClure said in his address.

Checking LANTA, LVPC

Suspicious of how the bi-county groups divide their services between the counties, McClure last year requested data from LANTA on the resources it allocates to the two counties. LANTA provided data from July 2018, which showed 54% of its spending for its bus service was along routes in Lehigh County while 46% was in Northampton County.

While McClure criticized the difference, LANTA Executive Director Owen O’Neil believes the data didn’t show the whole picture. No one had requested a county-by-county breakdown of LANTA services before, and the information it could provide McClure was limited, he said. Many routes cross the county line, and LANTA doesn’t track passengers by their residence. For example, one of LANTA’s most popular routes connects Bethlehem to the Lehigh Valley Mall. Most of the route is in Lehigh County, he said, but most of the passengers get on in Northampton County.

“Any time where a county is contributing to the system, I’m sure it’s understandable the county wants proportional service to what it’s putting in. I think it’s a fair concern. In the past, it wasn’t something that was a concern, so it wasn’t looked at,” O’Neil said. “If you look at the way things are distributed, I think we do a pretty good job of covering that.”

Since McClure first raised his complaint in January, he’s said LANTA has improved communications with the county. It’s in new discussions with the county’s Department of Human Services about the bus service to senior centers across the county, he said, and he was optimistic his concerns would be addressed.

Lehigh Valley Planning Commission

Most of McClure’s complaints about equity have been trained on the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission. At a sparsely attended Northampton County Council committee meeting in January, McClure and county Director of Public Works Michael Emili picked apart the 2019-2022 Transportation Improvement Plan, which allocates millions of federal and state dollars to the transportation grid and public transit. The projects are vetted years in advance and awarded money by the Lehigh Valley Transportation Study, an organization with representatives from both counties.

McClure argues that Northampton County has historically been on the short end of this setup and pointed to the current plan as proof. The Transportation Improvement Plan allocates $244 million to improve roads, railways and trails across the Lehigh Valley over the next four years, but 79 percent of that money is going to projects in Lehigh County. Projects in Northampton County, by contrast, will receive 14 percent, with the rest going to bicounty efforts.

“My recommendation at this time is to fully fund the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission,” McClure said in an interview with The Morning Call. “There may come a time when you should fund less than that.”

Becky Bradley, executive director of the Planning Commission, did not respond to requests for comment.

But Diacogiannis, the former Northampton County appointee to the commission, said McClure’s standpoint is out of sync with how the region has approached its transportation grid over the past 20 years. McClure’s criticisms miss the point of a regional plan, he said. He argued the commission shouldn’t even be the target of McClure’s complaint.

The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission doesn’t have final say on which roads and bridges get funding from the TIP. That job falls to the Lehigh Valley Transportation Study, a group that relies in part on Planning Commission staffers. All of the study’s decisions are made by its voting members: representatives of Lehigh and Northampton counties, the Lehigh Valley’s three cities, LANTA, the Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority and PennDOT. What’s more, the votes are weighted, and votes by the two counties count more than votes from other members, Diacogiannis said.

“He’s the one who has overriding control of this,” he said. “Don’t blame the Planning Commission for not delivering the monies.”

Worse still, he said, is the funding McClure is threatening doesn’t go toward the transportation planning. Instead, the $575,000 Northampton County pays the Planning Commission for advising communities in the county on zoning and planning. Those tools can help the county combat the growth of warehouses and protect quality of life in the region, issues that were part of McClure’s campaign platform.

“That’s the ironic thing. All of his concerns and issues are things we agree on,” Diacogiannis said.

Other members of the transportation study said the group has always tried to identify the most pressing needs in the region — municipal boundaries and the Lehigh-Northampton county line matter little to their decisions.

The highest priority, Lehigh County Director of General Services and Planning Commission alternate member Rick Molchany said, is typically given to PennDOT’s major highways. Residents across the Lehigh Valley rely on Route 22, so it’s little surprise that some of the costliest projects on the 2019-2022 TIP are for its repair and maintenance — resurfacing a 4-mile stretch east of the Route 512 interchange and a 3-mile portion between Route 309 and the 15th Street interchange. That doesn’t include construction underway on the Route 22 Fullerton interchange and the bridges over the Lehigh River; most of the $68 million for that work was spent in earlier plans.

The bigger problem, Molchany said, is that transportation funding can’t keep up with the grid’s needs. While Route 309 is receiving nearly $83 million for four projects over the next four years, dozens of other projects are on the back burner due to a lack of resources. Rather than dividing its voice, the Lehigh Valley needs to collectively apply more pressure to improve its transportation network, Molchany said.

“The greater need for the region is to convince the federal government to improve funding to spur routes,” he said, referring to less-traveled but still important state roads like North Cedar Crest Boulevard and William Penn Highway.

Lehigh County Executive Phillips Armstrong, who also sits on and nominates members to the Planning Commission, added that shopping and commuting trends don’t care about municipal boundaries. Census data compiled by the commission shows that 35,233 Northampton County residents commute to Lehigh County. Regardless of where the projects are, he said, people from across the region are using the improved transportation infrastructure.

Michael Rebert, executive director of PennDOT’s Lehigh Valley-based District 5, questioned McClure’s reliance on the current TIP to form the basis of his argument. Limiting the perspective to just a four-year window is a poor way to determine if one county is receiving favorable treatment. In past years, Northampton County received overwhelming portions of the TIP, such as when Route 33 was extended between Route 22 and Interstate 78 between 1999 and 2002, he said.

“It’s been fairly evenly divided between the two counties historically,” he said.

Despite their differences, Diacogiannis conceded that McClure has made some positive changes while pushing for a more county-versus-county perspective. At McClure’s instruction, Northampton County representatives pressured local municipalities to send in projects in hopes of landing funding, Diacogiannis said. Planning Commission officials have not disclosed details about applicants to their next longrange plan, but said there were about 260 of them, more than in recent memory.

Diacogiannis suspects most of the projects won’t be eligible for federal money, but he’s optimistic they could bring more attention to the scale of the funding problem in the region.

“We’ll know that there’s a sizable amount of unfunded needs in case something happens and the feds decide to loosen up the purse strings and offer up more money,” Diacogiannis said.