At the Thursday, May 28, Lancaster County Convention Center Authority (LCCCA) Board Meeting it was announced that, largely due to recent setbacks, the current construction budget has fallen to a negative $423,106. As explained by Laura Douglas, Chair of the Finance & Audit Committee, the nearly half-million-dollar budget overrun is the result of recent change orders.

More than five years after his violent death, a federal grand jury is at last investigating the murder of Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Luna, according to a letter from the Lancaster County PA district attorney’s office.

At the Wednesday, May 27, County Commissioners’ Meeting, the Commissioners passed a resolution to urge the Pennsylvania General Assembly to adopt a reasonable and “responsible” budget for 2009-2010. As stated in the resolution itself, the Commissioners’ primary concern is the shifting of “costs onto the local level.” In other words, the adoption of an overly stringent State budget would merely “pass the buck” down into local government budgets.

The May 24th article by LookingAtLancaster.com titled “Projects concealed from taxpayers until too late” touches upon the root cause of so much that has and is yet going wrong in Lancaster. It groups the current “streetscape” improvement program, the proposed streetcars, and the convention center project as “Significant but unnecessary projects costing huge sums of taxpayer dollars have been constructed without any meaningful input from the people who must pay the bills, and will forever live with the consequences.”

In a May 24th Letter to the Editor of the Sunday News headed “Ballpark ambush”, Joy Schwanger writes: “At the front gates people approach you, stating that if you give them your name and phone number you will be entered to win a free car. What they don’t tell you is you give them your information, it will be sold to a company called Sundance Vacations, which will relentlessly call you trying to ‘give’ you free vacations.”

For the past decade, Lancaster has seen more dramatic changes than at any time since the disastrous “Urban Renewal” projects of the 1960s and 1970s. Like “Urban Renewal”, these changes will have a lasting impact on Lancaster for decades to come. Also like “Urban Renewal”, these projects were implemented without any meaningful input from the taxpayers and voters whose money is being spent to create these changes.

At the Tuesday, May 19, School District of Lancaster (SDoL) Board Meeting, the Board discussed a painful rise in District pension costs that will begin in 2012. That year, schools all across the state will experience a jump in retirement rates that will, in turn, demand that schools reciprocally increase their payments to the Public School Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS).

The Hour Glass Foundation has announced the relocation of its June 4th program from the Lancaster Convention Center to the Pennsylvania Academy of Music at 42 N. Queen Street, Lancaster. The presentation portion is titled “Great Places Make Great Cities.”

In the May 19 New Era article, “Early voters favor lifting alcohol ban,” the publication went ahead and published premature exit polling results from West Lampeter Township in the afternoon edition. The article was posted around 11 a.m., with over nine hours left for citizens to cast their ballots. The article described the New Era’s polling procedure: “The survey was conducted by four reporters in the first couple hours of voting. It is only a snapshot of early voting activity, but it has proven in past years to be a reliable indicator of voter preferences.”