I just got my City Property Tax Bill. Wow. How wonderful that the Mayor explains away the 25% increase as just an extra $3.00-$4.00 per week for the average household; meanwhile, none of the current payment options allow you to pay your taxes on a weekly, or even monthly, basis!
Can’t pay the full amount all at once? Installment plan doesn’t work with your budget? I was told to wait for it to go to collection and set up a payment arrangement with the Tax Collection Bureau. Are you kidding? I have monthly installments with UGI, PPL, Comcast, Leffler Energy, and several other creditors; why can’t my taxes be paid in a monthly installment? And why can’t I do a bank to bank transfer to pay my city bills and avoid the 3.34% ‘convenience fee’ for using a credit card?
Also, since we are all supposed to use the city’s trash hauler, why not call it what it is and include those fees in with my tax bill? Why do I get a separate bill that costs the city additional money to print, mail, collect and follow up on? Simply offer a rebate/reduction for the difference to anyone who has their own hauler. Put the burden on those that go against the majority.
You may have noticed that some snow fell on Lancaster recently. That snow has been cleared from downtown streets, but at the same time, it’s piled nearly 4 feet deep and 4 feet wide on the side of my street that has no parking. If my neighborhood isn’t receiving the same service as downtown, what am I paying for?
Is it possible for the city to do something about all the stuff people are putting out on the streets to reserve ‘THEIR’ spaces? I thought I had seen everything, until yesterday! Sure, I’ve seen the everyday items such as: chairs (plastic, wood, metal, rocking, upholstered, you name it), patio furniture, trash cans, random buckets and recycling containers (which they don’t even actually own). I’ve also seen more obscure items such as: the unregistered-not-street-legal-scooter that’s normally parked on the sidewalk, potted plants, large children’s toys, coolers, appliance boxes, homemade-space-reserving-devices that resemble sawhorses, actual sawhorses, etc.
But yesterday, yesterday I saw a space reserved with a 6 foot, wooden step ladder. That was the first in quite a while. I mean, really? A parking space is that important to you? Why aren’t these items being regarded as what they are? TRASH! It is illegal to deposit trash onto the street!
So why are people allowed to get away with it? Instead, we let people establish a precedent, whereby a person sees other people doing it, so they think it’s OK for them to do it and then somebody sees them and the cycle goes on and on. The city has to put a stop to it! And apparently, we have to make them put a stop to it.
How are ambulances and fire trucks supposed to get to my house, when cars can barely get through the maze of snow piles and other trash lining the streets? If there is a fire, they better be able to put it out with the water in their tanks, because at least one of the hydrants near my house is blocked by a snow pile 4 feet deep and 6 feet wide. I’m sure this is the case on many other streets in the city.
Now, to make matters worse, since the Bureau of Fire’s layoffs, we’re getting one less firefighter on a real fire. For those who didn’t know, we used to get 12-14 firefighters, depending on the number of people off due to illness or on vacation. That’s 12-14 firefighters spread over 5 fire trucks, while the National Fire Protection Administration’s standard recommends a minimum of 4 firefighters on EACH fire truck, and even more on certain types of units!
Now we’re down to 11-13 per shift; however, the city puffs up this number by including Chief officers and Fire Marshals, who do not respond to most calls (claim they’re going to start responding), and when they do, they serve in an administrative capacity (a necessary role that must be filled by someone, sometimes multiple people), not actively fighting the fire.
This is not enough people to complete all the jobs that must be done at the scene of a fire! And what if they need help? The taxpayer, whose home is burning, has to wait for additional personnel to drive from their suburban homes to the firehouses (without the benefit of emergency lights and sirens), then wait some more, until there are enough of them to respond with one of the reserve fire trucks.
Lancaster City Bureau of Fire employees are not “Professional Firefighters”. At best, they are career firefighters, caring about little more than their paychecks. Apparently they don’t really even care about themselves or each other: within the last two years, it was proposed that volunteers be called in from the companies surrounding Lancaster to set up rescue teams for the city’s firefighters called “Rapid Intervention Teams”, on all real fires until sufficient career firefighters arrived to fill all the necessary roles to put out the fire, cover calls in the rest of the city, and then relieve the volunteers. The city’s career firefighters rejected this proposal outright, refusing help, alleging that it somehow took money out of their pockets.
This goes against the very mission of every fire department in the world: to protect life and property. How can they protect the other citizens and properties, if they don’t have enough personnel to help themselves in the event of a downed firefighter?
These career firefighters are a bunch of self-serving cry-babies:
The city wants us to change to 24 on, 48 off shifts. Whaaaa –A change in shifts could affect my side-job. Whaaaa The city wants us to change shifts without additional pay. Whaaaa – The city could call upon volunteers to cut down overtime, saving jobs. Whaaaa – The city wants me to pay more of my $21,000/year family health insurance plan. Whaaaa –
Meanwhile, each and every one of them earns more than the average income of a city resident; (most) don’t live in or pay taxes to the city, and want more money for sleeping at the firehouse a bit more often than they do now? They want more money for cutting more than 60 round-trips per year from their homes to the firehouse?
As a City Taxpayer, I don’t care if you don’t want to change shifts. If you don’t like it, go work somewhere else; I’m sure there are hundreds of people that would love to get paid what you get paid, even if they had to work 24 on, 24 off to get it.
I don’t care about your side job; many of you make twice what I do, not including your side job or your spouse’s income! I don’t care if you never get a chance to earn overtime; I never get overtime at my job, and neither do many of us in the private sector.
I don’t care if you don’t like working with volunteer firefighters; most volunteers are more professional than you, and serve their communities and others without pay because they care about each other and their communities.
Quit crying and do your job! Serve the tax-paying citizens of Lancaster City! That’s what I’m paying you to do.
And what about the streets department? There are potholes everywhere! The majority of these seem to originate from utilities, including the city itself, opening up the streets and then doing horrible patch work.
Perhaps the city needs to drastically increase the fee for utility companies cutting open streets and do the patches for them (oh wait, the city’s road crew does a terrible job with patching, so that won’t work); or, even better, require that all patches be inspected before signing off on the permit and require annual follow-up inspections to make sure the patch is holding up. This fee should also be charged a premium if the road was repaved recently.
Tell me why I can’t open up the city’s budget and see exactly which streets will be paved this year? How do they know how much to budget, if they don’t know which streets are going to be paved? Is it even possible that the city has no intention of paving any streets? Driven down Charles Road lately? The road is horrible, there are no lane markings and there is no curbing or sidewalks on the east side of the street. Will any of this necessary work ever get done?
I guess this is the responsibility of the city’s public works director, Charlotte Katzenmoyer, the person who makes over $100K/year and cannot give a progress report (on any project underway) upon demand. What am I paying her for?
I’d like to see her office produce a report on the condition of all the city’s infrastructure for which she is responsible, to include: size, type, quantity, location, age, condition, repair/replacement priority, projects underway, progress reports, anticipated start/completion dates for future projects, etc. And it should all be posted on the city’s website, and updated at least weekly, for everyone to see. That’s what we should be getting for our money, at a minimum!
Where is the accountability? If the city’s department heads can’t get things done, why do they still have their jobs? I know that if I failed to get things done on a regular basis, or could not tell my boss when they would be done, I wouldn’t have a job anymore.
It is way past time for the taxpayers of Lancaster City to take back their city and have their voices heard! We must stop letting our employees tell us how/when/if they’re going to work. We must not let those that hire incompetent people stay in office. It is time to take a stand! Get to city council meetings. Voice your concerns. Don’t let them vote yes, just because there is nobody there saying no. Let your council members know that you will not be re-electing them when their terms come due if they aren’t holding our employees responsible for their actions, or lack of action.
Wow. This diatribe could only have been written by Charlie Smithgall.