NewsLanc has no regrets

We recently reflected on whether in NewsLanc has become a public ‘scold.’ So we reviewed issue by issue:

Convention Center: We exposed deceit and demanded a Feasibility Study. None was ever commissioned until we contributed about $80,000 to supplement funding from the County Commissioners. The resulting PKF study was ignored despite being correct in its prognostications.

Street Cars: We opposed the lame brain trolley project. We exposed the inaccuracies in all of the sponsors’ false claims of successes elsewhere. We ridiculed the ‘push poll’ conducted to sell the project to the public.

Lancaster General Health: We criticize Lancaster General Health for being so stingy in its support of needy causes in contradiction to its lofty mission message. We challenged the propriety and legality as a public charity of paying over a million dollars to its president while he was away on leave for a year. We observed that the entire board of trustees consists of establishment Caucasians and all but the annual trustee meetings are closed to the public. Through its expansion throughout the local health care system, LGP has gained a monopolistic influence, increasing its profitability at the expense of driving up local health insurance costs.

Franklin and Marshall: We decried its former president for “doing the best possible things in the worst possible ways”, with heavy handed and cruel handling of the relocation of the rail yard to expand its campus without regard to pleas of affected neighbors that a study be made of possible alternative locations.

Lancaster City: We currently are critical of City Planner Randy Patterson and Mayor Rick Gray for failure to comprehend that the derelict Brunswick Hotel is a victim of the City built, owned and leased Marriott Hotel. The entire Lancaster Square East, apart from the public garage, needs to be included in redevelopment efforts, not just the former Bulova building.

County Library System: We have pointed out that either all libraries should be run by one system or the System should be radically downsized and live off fees for its services, if indeed it could. The present “one library, one vote” allows the many small libraries with far few users to consume an unfair portion of grants, thus causing them to turn a blind eye to System bloat. That the System would presume to run its own fund raising campaign in competition with the major libraries is an indication of its self-aggrandizing mindset.

LCBWMA: We question their spending up to $200 million to acquire the troubled plagued Harrisburg Incinerator which includes the environmental hazardous ‘mountains’ of ash accumulated over forty years. It has not provided a third party Feasibility Study or a professional Environmental Study. The waste authority had originally offered $45 million for the incinerator. Now it is spending more than its own net worthy and putting at risk its annual earnings. The accumulated wealth of the authority and thus the Lancaster population is being plucked to bail out Harrisburg.

So why NewsLanc? When there were multiple newspapers, they competed through investigative reporting and publishing exposes. Today the monopoly newspaper has no economic incentive to serve as community watchdog. Its business interests (and perhaps survival) lie in reporting day to day local news articles and in ‘getting along.’ We understand.