If one lives in Lancaster, one faces ongoing situations where one doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Here are a few:
1) School District of Lancaster board chair Richard Caplan ( a good guy) defends against accusations by board member Charlie Crystle (another good guy) that the board may have violated the Sunshine Act. Caplan says that at issue was the job performance of Superintendant Pedro Rivera, and thus an exemption from the law. If discussion of the ongoing employment of one individual is an excuse for the school board, could alleged private discussions of the performance and continued employment of over 200 workers at Conestoga View Nursing Home by the former commissions have been a violation of the Act? And why did the citizenry reward former District Attorney Donald Totaro with a judgeship for conducting a wild goose chase of a Grand Jury investigation for almost a year and finally coercing the commissioners into the dubious plea bargain in order to bring it to an end? Click here to read more.
(Of course the Sunshine Act is impractical. As we have stated in the past and as required by other public bodies, the way to allow for public vetting and comment is to require that the same decision be made on two successive public meetings.)
2) The former Pennsylvania Academy of Music building is named after Paul Ware (a well meaning and philanthropic heir to a huge estate), after Ware as PAM’s chair led the institution into ultimate bankruptcy which has cost the tax payers at least $20 million in direct governmental grants and for the purchase of the building for what we consider a vastly inflated sum. The price just happened to be enough to bail out Ware from his multi-million dollar guarantees of PAM debt. One would think that Ware would want to conceal his identification with the fiasco.
3) S. Dale High (a very shrewd business man), who was the principle sponsor of the Convention Center project which ended up absorbing over $170 million in direct government grants and guarantees and whose firms were the largest recipient of the proceeds and became equitable co-owner of the hotel, has special rights to put his name on the convention center in which he has no financial interest.
4) Lancaster General Hospital is a Public Charity that has averaged almost $100 million annually in profits over the past five years is arguably the most revered institution in the area. Yet they, a charity that acts with minimal transparency, only give away a pittance of their earnings to worthy causes, refuse to help support a syringe exchange, and presumed to give a gift of about $1,200,000 to its president when he took a year off. Yet no one but NewsLanc raises an eyebrow over any of this!
Worse yet, such folly and false values are symptomatic of our times and a major reason why our beloved nation is in rapid decline.
