I Got A Secret ; With A Tax Break For An Unknown Firm To Come To Town (Or Else) And A Bill To Take Legal Notices To Government Websites Only, You Again Face Being Kept In The Dark.

editorials

Things that make us go hmmmmm.....

The phrase "pig in a poke" keeps coming to mind in reading aboutthe School District of Lancaster board's recent vote to give a$54,000 tax break to ... well, no one knows.

No one, that is, except the developer of the office park at theold Lancaster Stockyards.

The developer, Timothy Harrison, recently asked the SDoL board tocut in half the school tax bill for a company interested in movinginto the complex, from nearly $108,000 a year to $54,000. Otherwisethe firm will go elsewhere. City officials, including Mayor RickGray, last week convinced the board to approve the exemption.

Not that a tax break is necessarily a bad idea. We just don'tlike the secrecy.

If a firm wants tax incentives, the company should have toidentify itself in advance, so elected officials know whom and whatthey're voting for.

Speaking of secrecy, if you want to know what your electedofficials are up to, ask your state representative and senator tovote against legislation that would allow government agencies topost legal notices on their own websites instead of in general-circulation newspapers.

Full disclosure: This newspaper company earns money frompublishing notices of upcoming meetings and bids for supplies andservices. So we certainly have a vested interest in calling for thedefeat of Senate Bill 803, recently passed by the Senate EducationCommittee, and House Bill 633, which faces a committee vote after ahearing Thursday, May 19.

But citizens have a vested interest in the defeat of those billstoo.

Statistics show that some 31 percent of Pennsylvania adults don'tuse the Internet. Fifty-eight percent of senior citizens aren'tonline. Moving public notices to the Web will disenfranchise asignificant part of the population.

Putting public notices on government websites is especiallyproblematic in Pennsylvania, with its layers upon layers of local,county and state agencies. Do you know where to find your townshipwebsite? How about school district? County government? StateLegislature? Education Department? Can you navigate through thoseuser-unfriendly sites to find the public notices?

On some of those, we're lucky if we can find a contact emailaddress, let alone the legal ads.

SB 803 and HB 633 won't save money for local governments, whichwill have to pay someone to put those notices online and maintainthe website. All the bills will do is make Pennsylvania governmenteven less transparent than it is now. And that's dark indeed.

Speaking of the Legislature, last month state senators were toldthat Pennsylvania has sunk $500 million - and counting - into anemergency radio system that not only isn't finished, but what hasbeen built doesn't always work.

The 800-megahertz "Open Sky" radio network has been underconstruction for more than a decade. The project has been plagued bycost overruns and overly optimistic expectations.

Lancaster County, which had been piggybacking on the statecontract, finally decided in 2008 to pull the plug, after $14million worth of investment, and move toward a different kind ofemergency radio network. Maybe the state should do the same.

Speaking of wasting money, local architects John deVitry and GeneAleci are asking PennDOT to stop work on a replacement for theLititz Pike bridge because the plan, which aligns a new bridge withNorth Duke Street, will hurt the neighborhood by encouraging trafficto move faster.

Mr. deVitry and Mr. Aleci know enough about the planning processto realize that the time for this kind of objection passed long,long ago. PennDOT is ready to start work in the fall of 2012.

The existing Lititz Pike span is a bottleneck and an accidentwaiting to happen. Not to mention a bridge long crumbling.

Time to start building.