Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from Pennsylvania’s newspapers:
Talk cheap on property tax reform
Altoona Mirror
Jan. 23
As surely as Pennsylvania General Assembly legislative sessions come and go, so does the issue of property tax reform.
Property tax reform jumped out of its state capital slumber again on Jan. 7 as Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati, R-Jefferson, was speaking with reporters.
Scarnati, acknowledging that deciding such a large, complicated issue during an election year is difficult, said, nevertheless, that having a floor vote on the issue seems warranted since many senators have for years advocated action to reform the property levy.
Not just the Senate: The state House of Representatives has had bouts with the issue for decades as well, without anything major coming about.
State property owners are dealt a dose of optimism until they realize eventually that what they received again was nothing but a governmental placebo.
For decades, state lawmakers never have been able to figure out how to guarantee a pot of money to replace the revenue currently being derived from the property tax.
Talk is cheap regarding property tax reform when there is no legislative stomach for increasing the state income tax, adopting a severance tax involving the Marcellus Shale gas drilling industry, or upping or expanding the state sales tax.
Beyond that, some past property-tax-reform proposals have contained a provision for reintroducing that tax under certain circumstances - meaning that the re-enacted property tax would be a “new” layer of taxation built on top of the levies increased to pay for the reform.
The opinion of most taxpayers is that if the property tax is going to be eliminated, the “legislative stake” should remain planted in its heart forever.
Up to now, no Pennsylvania legislative session has been able or willing to guarantee that. However, lawmakers haven’t been shy about duping state residents into thinking that property-tax elimination might be on the horizon.
Much the same occurs regarding reducing the size of the Legislature.
Scarnati’s intent probably isn’t to dupe anyone, but he should not be making implications regarding the possibility of votes in the Senate and House on an issue so difficult that substantial progress has not been able to be achieved even in non-election years.
Granted, the property tax issue has experienced limited progress around its proverbial edges, such as with the Homestead Exemption, but property owners shouldn’t grasp even a morsel of hope that anything substantial is going to take place in 2020, 2021 or anytime soon beyond that.
Taxpayers must keep in mind that Pennsylvania, only during the past two years, has made some progress in resolving its fiscal morass. Barring major courageous action by lawmakers to make the difficult decisions to create a window for property tax elimination, there is virtually no way it can occur.
And, to think major property tax reform can take place while that tax is allowed to remain on the books in any reduced form - just in case - would result in a magic show gone wrong.
“It comes down to tough votes,” Scarnati acknowledged, while speaking about having conversations about the issue with Gov. Tom Wolf.
Scarnati also noted the release of a report last month by a bipartisan Senate-House School Property Tax Work Group; the report outlines five separate plans ranging from cutting the property tax for senior citizens to the total elimination of the tax.
Unfortunately, Scarnati, while not intending to do so, is in fact now promoting a charade.
Pennsylvania taxpayers don’t deserve to be fooled.
Online: https://bit.ly/2tRQMix
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Toomey, be fair and impartial
The Citizens’ Voice
Jan. 27
Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania is temperamentally and politically moderate - not unlike his Democratic counterpart Sen. Bob Casey and, for the most part, the commonwealth that they both represent in the Senate. That is especially so in comparison with the partisan flamethrowers and Trump acolytes who have come to dominate Toomey’s party.
President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, as it has been structured by hyper-partisan Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, raises the question for Toomey whether that partisan prerogative will supersede the pressing need for comprehensive disclosure of President Donald Trump’s conduct.
There are two juries that must render verdicts on that conduct.
Senators themselves are jurors by constitutional designation, although many of them - including McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - already have violated the jurors’ oath to be fair and impartial. Just about everyone recognizes that the Republican majority in the Senate will acquit Trump.
The second jury comprises all but the 100 Americans who are not U.S. senators, especially voters. They are entitled to all of the information necessary to render their own verdicts, including documents that the Trump administration has refused to release and an array of witnesses who have first-hand knowledge of the matters at hand.
Impeachment testimony in the House demonstrated clearly that Trump tried to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into announcing an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, and to support a long debunked conspiracy theory promulgated by Russia that Ukraine, rather than Russia, had meddled in the 2016 president election with the goal of helping Trump. There also is no doubt that Trump attempted to stonewall the House investigation.
It’s one thing if the Republican senators’ partisanship leads them to conclude that such conduct by a president is acceptable. It is unacceptable, however, for those senators to deny relevant information to the second set of jurors.
Toomey should be among Republican senators who vote to call witnesses and subpoena documents in the cause of comprehensive disclosure of the president’s conduct.
Online: https://bit.ly/36C6jA3
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Preliminary numbers indicate that Pennsylvania Game Commission changes may work
York Dispatch
Jan. 28
The Pennsylvania Game Commission is not terribly popular among many of the state’s hunters.
Even the PGC board of commissioners will admit that.
The board’s decision to change decades of deer-hunting tradition in 2019 with a Saturday firearms opener met with more than a little opposition.
“After looking at everything, it worked out that one-third said they were against, one-third enjoyed the change and one-third didn’t care and just wanted to hunt,” Southeast Region commissioner Brian Hoover said during a PGC meeting this past Saturday. “We’re going to give this a few years, and in time I think people are going to like this new tradition.”
Many opponents of the Saturday opener would say that Hoover’s math is a little off. They would claim that more than half of the state’s hunters would like a return to the traditional opening day on the first Monday after Thanksgiving.
Some traditions, they believe, just shouldn’t be messed with.
Well, now the PGC has some preliminary numbers to bolster its argument in the debate with the traditionalists.
After decades of steady decline, the number of hunting licenses sold in the state actually showed a slight increase in 2019. The jump in license sales is very small, just 0.4% through December, representing an increase of 3,351 licenses. The numbers are also just preliminary.
Still, by comparison, in the previous license year, the PGC reported that license sales declined by 3.4%, a loss of more than 30,000 hunters. Since the peak year for license sales in 1982, sales increased just 13 times in 36 years. There are 30% fewer hunters in the state than in 1982.
The PGC believes there’s a strong correlation between the 2019 Saturday opener and increased license sales, providing reason for optimism that further increases could be achieved in coming years.
Sunday hunting: Of course, it’s expected that there will be three days of Sunday hunting in 2020, including the Sunday following the Saturday firearms deer opener.
The PGC says that is all a part of its plan to increase hunting opportunities in the state.
“In this day and age, where people lead busy lifestyles and many hunters who drop from the ranks do so because they can’t find the time to hunt, creating opportunity might be the biggest key in keeping hunters active to carry on our traditions and maintain strong wildlife populations,” PGC Executive Director Bryan Burhans said in a recent news release.
In addition, during the PGC meeting this past Saturday, newly appointed board president Charlie Fox read correspondence from several businesses saying the Saturday opener for firearms deer season was the most profitable they have had. The letters countered a claim made during the public comment portion of the meeting that 10 businesses had a combined six-figure loss of revenue.
Of course, many opponents believe the Saturday opener and Sunday hunting are just a money grab by the PGC, while doing nothing for the state’s sportsmen. They constantly harp on the PGC for a lack of deer in the state, especially in the traditional deer-hunting regions in the northern tier, where many longtime hunting camps are located.
Stubborn breed: It should be noted, however, that hunters can be a stubborn breed. Many will resist change at every turn because it’s simply not in their nature to embrace progress.
Given that kind of staunch opposition, it took more than a little fortitude for the PGC to make the change to a Saturday opener in 2019, while also allowing limited Sunday hunting in 2020.
Now, it appears, the changes may actually have a chance to achieve their main goal - increasing the number of hunters in the state, or least stopping the decline.
The preliminary indications are positive, but only time will tell if the changes will ultimately produce permanent progress.
Online: https://bit.ly/2u3ZjyC
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Improve bus safety: Seat and shoulder belts should be mandatory
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Jan. 29
Less than half of the tour buses on the nation’s highways have seat and shoulder belts, safety equipment the National Transportation Safety Board has been recommending for the past 50 years.
It shouldn’t take another accident with injuries and fatalities to push the seat-belt issue from recommendation to requirement.
The Jan. 5 multivehicle crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike raised the issue of motor coach safety once again after the driver of the bus involved in the accident and two passengers were among five people killed. There were no safety belts in the bus for passengers, only the driver.
The NTSB has been pushing for passenger safety belts since the 1960s, but the only real progress has been a requirement for belts on larger buses built after 2016. More than half of the 30,000 buses on the road do not fall into that category.
Also troubling is the fact that smaller buses - those between 10,000 and 26,000 pounds - have no requirement for safety belts.
Despite a mountain of evidence showing that seat and shoulder belts save lives in vehicle crashes, there seems little urgency to make the NTSB recommendations mandatory. The safety board is an independent agency that reviews accidents and can only make recommendations to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Department of Transportation.
In a 2016 report to Congress, the traffic administration estimated it would cost $14,650 to $40,000 to retrofit each existing tour bus. Pointing to studies showing that only about 10% of bus passengers use available seat and shoulder belts, the NHTSA concluded “retrofitting was unlikely to produce substantial safety benefits.”
The benefits may not be substantial, but they certainly matter. From 2009 to 2018, 461 passengers were killed when tour buses crashed, according to the Transportation Department. Many of those fatalities were the result of passengers being ejected from the vehicle or thrown about the interior after impact.
There is a cost factor in requiring safety belts on all tour buses, but it’s time Congress took the repeated recommendations from the NTSB and made them law. A half-century of warnings is far too long to wait for action.
Online: https://bit.ly/2S12ajP
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A future for the Route 15 trolley?
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Jan. 28
SEPTA pulled the last four Route 15 trolley cars out of service Sunday and says it plans to have the line’s vintage fleet of 18 electric vehicles overhauled and rolling again in 2021. Until then, SEPTA buses will serve the crosstown line’s 8,700 daily riders, many of whom live in neighborhoods along the 8.4-mile stretch of Girard Avenue between West Philly and Port Richmond.
The resumption of trolley service in 2005 may well have played a role in the avenue’s resurgent vitality, but the future of this important piece of SEPTA’s intra-city network matters not only to neighborhood residents, or to trolley buffs who love Route 15′s classic rolling stock. Dependable mass transit is fundamental for a city facing issues of persistent poverty, income inequality, and gentrification, as well as to an entire region wrestling with the economic and environmental impacts of traffic congestion.
What happens to the Route 15 matters to SEPTA, too. The love-to-hate-it agency generally has done a better job promoting and providing at least some of its essential services in recent years. But SEPTA certainly failed to adequately communicate its intentions after news of the imminent end of trolley service broke Jan. 21, sparking a “Fix the 15” petition drive by 5th Square, self-described as Philly’s urbanist political action committee. Concerns among riders and other transit supporters, some with memories of the abrupt end of trolley service on the beloved 23 line to Chestnut Hill in 1992, were only somewhat allayed during a packed SEPTA meeting last week.
Many people treasure the vintage trolleys; the same so-called PCC II cars that have been running on Girard Avenue are tourist attractions in other cities. But this line has little to do with tourism and everything to do with getting local people where they need to go. The cars were built in the late 1940s and rebuilt in 2002 as part of a $88 million project. The cost of the latest rehab, expected to extend the life of the cars by 10 years, is not yet known. By then, a $1.3 billion proposal to modernize the entire trolley system inside and outside the city should be finalized.
But it’s worth asking whether it makes sense to pour more money into the PCC II trolleys simply to get them back in service for another 10 years. The fact that only four cars were still in use, with the rest of the fleet described as unable to pass state and local inspections, raises real questions about whether costly repairs will be needed.
SEPTA recently began rethinking some of the fundamentals of its bus routes, issuing a blueprint in 2018 for overhauling the transit authority’s bus network in the face of declining ridership and increased competition from other transportation providers like Uber. In fact, one of the recommendations in the blueprint called for replacing the 15 trolley with a bus route. So why tinker with the novelty trolleys if bus service is a better alternative for the long run? That question deserves an answer, not only for nostalgia buffs and transit fans but for the people who depend on having reliable service on Route 15.
Online: https://bit.ly/2t79F0f
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