Re: “Smithgall lists his achievements as mayor; Gray remains silent”
ANONYMOUS: Clipper Stadium was a project of a local ad-hoc community group which was working to bring baseball back to Lancaster. The only reason it is on Prince St. is because Manheim Twp. repeatedly rejected it. Remember that Smithgall illegally offered the stadium $900,000 in City funds, which was blocked by City Council.
SMITHGALL: The writer is correct until the last sentence where his memory and grasp of the facts fail him / her . The $900,000 had nothing to do with a request for funds from the City. Rather the city was required to provide assurance that the $900,000 would be forthcoming. Although of a different political party, I have always worked successfully with state Republicans Democrats alike. Gov. Rendell personally assured that the state would provide the $900,000 and encouraged me to meet a technical requirement by signing a commitment letter. Actually, the state came through with almost $2 million dollars and the city never laid out a cent.
ANONYMOUS: First Friday and the Arts District predates Smithgall. Retail rents in downtown Lancaster had dropped so low that artists could easily afford to open galleries here.
SMITHGALL: Sam Loph who was director of the Downtown Investment District brought the concept to me and I said “Let’s try it.” This is consistent with my readiness to listen to suggestions from outside city government.
ANONYMOUS: Binns Park was created by a private donation, all Smithgall did was follow through on the donor’s wishes.
SMITHGALL: We recognized the need to revitalize the area and it was part of a federal plan. I worked with Sen. Arlen Specter and received federal funds through an urban design program which was launched during the Clinton Administration. Upon receiving the federal commitment, the Binns family generously provided additional funds to pay for the fountain and furnishings.
ANONYMOUS: The hotel and convention center project is the single biggest public works project, as well as the single biggest waste of taxpayer dollars, in Lancaster County history. Smithgall blocked HACC from taking over the Watt & Shand site; HACC is now bringing lots of economic assets to East Lampeter Twp.
SMITHGALL: The early convention center concept was for a much smaller project with the hotel sponsors putting up 75% of the money and the tax payers 25%. The decision to gloss over funding shortfall and an unfavorable feasibility study was made by the Gray Administration.
HACC withdrew before I was sworn into office. The withdrawal took place a few weeks after the election.
ANONYMOUS: Smithgall’s interpretation of neighborhood policing took officers AWAY from responding to emergencies across town in a timely manner.
SMITHGALL: It reduced reaction time because bicycle officers already in the neighborhood could get to the scene earlier than the patrol cars. We had a minimum of fifteen police officers on the streets as compared to the current eight of less.
ANONYMOUS: The bus terminal was instigated and created by the RRTA, Smithgall had nothing to do with it.
SMITHGALL: The terminal was proposed before I became mayor but I executed the documents and assisted in expediting the project. I also obtained money through Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum to build the new E. King Street parking garage.
ANONYMOUS: Smithgall rejected a bipartisan proposal for a $5 million police station as being too expensive. He then went on to deceive City Council and build an $18 million palace for the police (with poor internal security).
SMITHGALL: On the advice of the Chief Landis, I rejected the location at South Queen and Vine. He felt the site too small for future growth and current needs. We examined the remodeling of the existing police station but it was too small to accommodate the number of police officers. Due to neighborhood complaints about the existing outdoor firing range in the South East of the city, we added a firing range to the new design. The actual final cost for the larger station came to between $10 million and $12 million.
ANONYMOUS: Increased acreage of parks? No idea what he means. But Smithgall let City parks and playgrounds deteriorate to the point they were unsafe. It took Gray to start renovations which make parks safe and attractive for children.
SMITHGALL: We added a total of about ten acres of parkland through private donations, five acres of which became Holly Point Park. I solicit that donation over a two year period.
Smithgall’s responses to comments about the hotel and convention center are true, but quite incomplete:
– HACC pulled out because mayor-elect Smithgall promised to block the deal which would have brought the college into downtown Lancaster.
– Smithgall was an integral part of the negotiations which allowed the project to grow from the originally proposed $30 million taxpayer dollars to well over $140 million taxpayer dollars, with no significant increase in private investment.
– The Gray administration inherited from Smithgall IRON-CLAD AGREEMENTS between Lancaster City, the Penn Square Partners, and the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority. If Gray had not straightened out the financial mess that Smithgall’s negotiating left behind, Lancaster City could have been subject to lengthy and expensive lawsuits. Combined with the other re-opened bids, the project again found itself at least $20 million over budget.
EDITOR: How fast the author of the above forgets … or chooses to forget.
Below is an extract from NewsLanc’s Convention Center Series. Former Mayor Smithgall may have lamented that the project appeared doom, but it was current Mayor Rick Gray who held the press conference and blatantly and inaccurately described that the $20 million had been obtain to enable the project to move ahead.
Particularly of interest to us at the time was that the sponsors had refrained from making the misrepresentations but had delegated it Gray.
(July, 2006)
With the news of the bid overage, as it did on earlier occasions, Penn Square Partners and Lancaster Newspapers immediately implied imminent death for the project.
“Bids doom center plans: Penn Square Partners says $20 million ‘gap too great,” lamented the Intelligencer Journal in its front page headline.
“It’s a sad day,” Jack Buckwalter, chairman of Lancaster Newspapers Inc., was quoted in his own newspaper. “One could say we are still going to try, but it is very unlikely at this juncture. Dale (High) and I said this afternoon there’s nothing we could have done differently.”…
.
“That building [Watt & Shand] is the heart and soul of Lancaster County,” Smithgall said. “Penn Square Partners took it over to make it a better thing for the city, and … the abuse they have taken by uneducated people that don’t see the long-term benefits for the whole county was terrible.”…
Commissioner Molly Henderson was gracious, but blunt.
“The risks outweighed, by far, any potential benefits here,” Henderson said after the overage was announced. “I have always been concerned about the taxpayer risk and the imbalance in the public-private partnership. The risk and the expense have been too great for the project.”…
Two weeks later, on August 11th, 2006, Lancasterians picked up their morning Intelligencer Journal and saw, in headlines usually reserved for the beginnings or endings of wars, that the $20 million budget overage had been solved.
“CENTER CLOSES FUND GAP: DEVELOPERS TO INCREASE THEIR STAKE”
In keeping with the life-or-death, resurrection imagery favored by project sponsors, the lede from the Intelligencer Journal’s Dave Pidgeon reads:
“Lancaster city Mayor Rick Gray announced a plan Thursday to keep alive a hotel/convention center project by plugging a $20 million funding gap.”
According to both the Intelligencer Journal and the Lancaster New Era, the “plan” was to fill the $20 million hole by:
• Lancaster Newspapers using $7 million of its own money to build a parking garage, plus loaning the Lancaster Parking Authority $3 million in an “interest-free” loan.
• Penn Square Partners investing another $1million
• Charging $2 million for “Naming Rights” to the center
• Shaving off $5.25 million for “Value-engineering”
• The Historic Preservation Trust giving $3 million to the center
• Saving $1.5 million from favorable interest rates from a $14 million construction bond to be floated by RACL.
The “plan” announced by the Mayor was immediately met by howls of criticism from project opponents.
Commissioner Dick Shellenberger said, “It’s not right to count the garage as savings when it wasn’t in there in the first place.”
Lancaster First, the citizen organization started by Randy Carney, Ron Harper, Jr., and April Koppenhaver, said in a public statement at the time that the plan was “Smoke and mirrors”:
The Lancaster First statement read in part:
“1) The $7 million in savings from the parking garage, now to be funded by Lancaster Newspapers, Inc., was never part of the original budget, and therefore can’t be counted as reducing the deficit.
“2) The $3 million pledged by the Historic Preservation Trust is raiding the money allocated to create an educational museum.
“3) The $5.25 million in ‘value engineering’ – which has been undertaken several times before – can only result in a substandard facility which will lack aesthetic and result in much higher operating and maintenance expenses.” (This would become apparent upon the completion of the project.)
“4) The $2 million for the ‘naming rights’ is sheer conjecture.” (As of March, 2013, not a cent has been achieved, perhaps in part because of the contract by which S. Dale High, as an individual, is given certain naming rights preferences.)
Lancaster Newspapers did not note that some of the money used to ‘rescue’ the project meant that other worthy city projects would be denied funding. An important one was the Lancaster Public Library which served about 1400 persons daily. It had been promised $3 million in state earmarked funds towards a renovation and expansion plan. The funds were re-directed to paying convention center cost overruns.
As a result, the library cancelled its plans after having spending several hundred thousand dollars for design and preparation for a public fund raising campaign to supplement the $1.5 million pledged by a private party.
But libraries and other civic concerns were not the bother of project sponsors. With the budget gap ‘filled’ and a majority rubber stamp awaiting them at the LCCCA, the sponsors knew that this battle, perhaps the crucial one in this bitter war, was over.
To Anonymous above:
All I know is that you posted this same comment under Becky’s blog. That’s says enough for me. That woman is unbalanced and doesn’t live in Lancaster. You are entitled to voice your opinion, but when that woman is involved, your integrity just went down the toilet.