RIP Former Lehigh County Executive Bill Hansell

From Lehigh County – Regrettably, the citizens of the Lehigh Valley have lost a true champion; former Lehigh County Executive, Bill Hansell, has succumbed to the health issues that forced him to resign last month and which continued to escalate over the past two weeks despite the hopes and prayers of a literal legion of friends and former co-workers and his family's constant vigil.

With the experience of over 50 years of outstanding public service, Bill was an incredible source of knowledge and guidance and was singularly focused on doing what was best for the citizens of each government entity he managed.  Bill clearly had his favored political views and would relish a lively discussion with those of differing opinions, but was always the consummate gentleman, committed to working differences out in favor of the citizens he served.

Bill was also a loving husband, father and grandfather and our deepest sympathies go out to his wife, Connie, and his entire family for the deep loss that they are experiencing and we all share. 

LC Comm'rs Offer Prayers, Best Wishes for Bill Hansell

As a result of unexpected health concerns, Lehigh County Exec Bill Hansell has stepped down. The Board of Commissioners issued a joint statement yesterday, thanking Hansell for his service, and offering prayers and best wishes,

Hansell, a former Commissioner, was appointed last summer to finish the unexpired term of Don Cunningham, and has led county staff in beginning implementation of priority-based budgeting and performance measurement, along with the usual leadership responsibilities of a 2,000-person organization.

"Bill cares deeply about good governance," said Board Chair Lisa Scheller. "He stepped in at a difficult time, and got up to speed on the budget and other issues quite rapidly. We're saddened to hear of his illness and wish only the best for Bill, Connie and the family."

Bill Hansell's State of Lehigh County Message

Under our charter, the Lehigh County executive is required to deliver a “State of the County” message to our Board of Commissioners before the end of February each year. I decided against an elaborate presentation of this message and instead chose to simply deliver it to you in writing. I was invited to speak at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon next month and I will also outline the state of our county to the businesses and members there.

Our county is among the largest in Pennsylvania. More than 350,000 people call Lehigh County home. Tens of thousands of businesses operate here, countless cultural arts institutions and organizations thrive here, and we assess property taxes on more than 125,000 properties. The sum total of all of those people, institutions and businesses is the essence of Lehigh County.

This message is intended to brief you on the state of Lehigh County’s government, not necessarily the state of Lehigh County, which encompasses much more.

Over the past seven years, through Don Cunningham’s stewardship and, more recently, mine, Lehigh County’s government has been managed in a fiscally prudent but responsive manner, balancing the need to keep our tax burden low with providing services needed to help the county’s most vulnerable residents. Despite the increased demand that a recession brings to county services, Lehigh County’s government is considerably smaller than it was seven years ago.

The 2013 budget that my administration proposed was the third consecutive year for the County’s budget to be lower than the prior year and was a full $50 million lower than in 2010. The number of employees working for Lehigh County is now 6 percent below our employee compliment of twenty years ago. As a result of bipartisan collaboration that was carried out in good faith with four commissioners as well as other elected officials, we committed to find another $3.5 million in spending cuts and turn a planned one-year tax credit into a permanent reduction in our millage rate.

I have been privileged to serve local governments for over half a century, from a small town to a growing suburb to the 1st and 3rd largest cities in our Commonwealth. I have lead two major associations devoted to improving local government and have advised local governments from Australia to South Africa to the Balkans.

Because of the long career and wealth of experience that I have with government budgets, I know what a well-managed government looks like. The management and direction of Lehigh County at present and over the past seven years has been a resounding success by any measurable standard.

In that period of time, Lehigh County was able to renovate our county courthouse, saving $20 million in the process, build Coca Cola Park, which is rapidly becoming one of the biggest attractions in our area, and create a plan to significantly enhance the Trexler Nature Preserve. With the capital funds that were saved through numerous cost-cutting measures on the courthouse, the county was able to undertake the most comprehensive facilities and capital program upgrade in this county’s history, ranging from a state of the art 911 dispatch center to more than 20 bridge replacements and repairs.

Through the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program we are providing $2.2 million which will be used in neighborhoods that are in danger of decline by purchasing, rehabilitating and selling of distressed properties. Meanwhile, our Green Future Fund program has pushed the total of farmland acres preserved past the 20,000-acre mark and, most recently, released $1.1 million to six municipalities for important parks and recreation projects.

As a result of the business community and our county government’s hard work in the area of economic development, earlier this year, Lehigh County was recognized by the Fourth Economy Community Index as one of the top ten best counties in the nation to attract growth and investment in the future.

The first priority of the county must be to protect the people who live here. Providing a safe environment is the first and most important step to creating economic growth. Our highest priority over the past seven years has been a commitment to public safety and justice.

More than seventy cents of every Lehigh County tax dollar is spent on people, institutions and systems that combat crime and help to maintain law and order. Strong efforts in this area have benefits that are twofold. First, our efforts help to make Lehigh County a safer place to live in the short term, and second, every dollar that we spend today on law and order helps to prevent further spending to pay the costs associated with crime and punishment down the road.

We have fully funded the effort to connect every police department in Lehigh County to police departments in other counties, to each other and to the State Police with “real time” sharing of data records. We also provided funding to put ten new police officers on the streets of six Lehigh County municipalities, opened a new state-of-the-art 911 center and fully renovated and expanded our work release center with a focus on more effective counseling for both men and women.

In collaboration with District Attorney Jim Martin, we have opened a Central Booking Unit designed to put officers back on the street quickly after making an arrest, a digital forensic lab in collaboration with DeSales University and a Regional Crime Center, which can pull in data from an extremely wide range of law enforcement sources to determine crime patterns, cross-match information on potential suspects and provide solid leads to the local police.

The overall goal has been simple. We want Lehigh County to be a safe place to live and a very unfriendly place for lawbreakers.

Just last week, some of you may have attended the groundbreaking of a facility that was the result of a unique partnership between Lehigh County and Cetronia Ambulance Corps. We sold the land to Cetronia, who built a facility that was big enough to house their own public health and safety operations and include a new medicolegal facility for our coroner as well as space to house our emergency management vehicles. We were able to save millions on the facility through this partnership.

In a month or so, we will hold a grand opening for our new Lehigh County Detoxification Center in partnership with a private provider, White Deer Run. This facility was built without the use of Lehigh County tax dollars.

The only way that Lehigh County can enhance services in these crucial areas without putting a burden on taxpayers is to be as frugal and efficient as possible with what we spend on our basic operations, and I’m proud to report that that’s exactly what we’ve done and what we will continue to do. Most important, our employees have been committed to that goal and I take particular pride in recognizing the great partnership that we have gotten from our unions.

Total staffing has been reduced by 143 full-time positions and another 28 positions have been converted to critical public safety positions—with the reductions occurring in both our union and non-union units. All the while, we have successfully avoided having any contract negotiations move to arbitration.

I am also proud to say that the County’s healthcare costs have increased an average of only 1.3% annually since this administration took office in 2006, which is something I doubt many private sector companies can say. We have gotten there by tough negotiating, transferring a significant portion of the costs to all of our employees and increasing the focus on wellness programs to limit the future growth of this very challenging budget line item.

This has happened not in spite of, but because of, our union contracts. Without arbitration, we have negotiated agreements with all our unions to keep wage growth under control and for all workers -- union and non-union -- to pay about 20 percent of the cost of their healthcare.

We are emerging from the recent recession in sound financial condition, and in better shape than many other municipal and county governments in America. Any way that you choose to measure it, the state of our county finances is sound.

Thanks to the spirit of cooperation that has prevailed on the Board of Commissioners, especially through the early years of the administration, we have been able to accomplish a great deal in just seven short years--and we have been able to do what we have done in a cost-effective manner. But I am a strong believer in continuous improvement.

When I was appointed County Executive, I made a commitment to focus on continuous improvement and we are following through on that commitment. I have tapped into my old rolodex and sought out resources and former associates from the professional association that I used to lead, the ICMA, to begin the implementation of a performance management process for all departments. This performance management initiative will sharpen the focus on the goals that we hope to achieve and it will increase efficiency in the processes we use to get to those goals.

We have also launched a major priority-based budget initiative which could have a dramatic impact on the way we approach our budget process and on how we analyze the things we do with our taxpayers’ money. We plan to explore several possible and examine different scenarios for changes or reductions in functions and services. Over the coming months, we will undertake a new way of looking at how we choose what is important and what ends up in our budget.

Despite the County Executive’s veto and the administration’s advice against reassessing last year, we were able to make the best of the situation and follow the Board of Commissioner’s direction to reassess, and the process went smoothly.

We have come through the reassessment process and the required appeals period with very good results from a County financial perspective, if not to the delight of almost half of our property owners. As we have experienced, reassessment can be a very controversial issue and one which can be seriously flawed if left in the hands of politicians. Barring unexpected action by the State to make the process occur at regular intervals, this administration recommends that the Board of Commissioners press for a charter change via referendum to ensure that it happens.

Lehigh County is home to all of us, and the decisions that we make will have an impact not just today, but far into the future. I believe that government has a place in our lives; it has a role to play in the provision of basic services and that it must be properly funded in order to fulfill its mandates.

Overall, the state of Lehigh County government is strong and our county is steadily recovering from the devastation of the recession. Reports from the housing market are encouraging, salaries are beginning to rise again and we are seeing more companies opt to move from outside the area to within our borders, which should work positively on the stalled job market.

However, we’re certainly not out of the difficult times yet and there is a greater need than ever to demonstrate the spirit of cooperation that has always been the hallmark of Lehigh County government. This is a time when we have to put political party differences and ideology aside, as we did in crafting a bipartisan 2013 Budget, and work together toward the common good, and in the best interests of our county’s taxpayers. That’s what I committed to do when I was appointed County Executive and what I continue to hope can be forged with our Board of Commissioners, despite the fact that it is an election year.

We’ve weathered an extremely difficult economic stretch but were still able to get many important things accomplished. We need to do even more together now that we see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Hansell Vetoes $5 Million Jobs Cut in Lehigh County

LC Exec Bill Hansell

Despite the lack of power, Lehigh County Executive Bill Hansell convened a news conference on November 1 to announce his veto of a budget amendment approved by a divided, 5-4, Board of Commissioners late last month. Their amendment slashed $5 million from the budget by reducing compensation to the County's workforce. Hansell blasted this jobs cut as "an unnecessary threat made against a work force that is already well under the number of employees that Lehigh County had twenty years ago." He added this cut "serves only to demoralize our staff with threats of furloughs, layoffs and terminations."

In addition to the veto, Hansell reduced non-personnel expenses by $3.5 million from what was contained in his original budget, which he called a compromise to a budget amendment that proposed $5 million.

Supporting Hansell at this news conference were Lehigh County Commissioners Percy Dougherty, David Jones, Dan McCarthy and Brad Osborne. With this support, it appears unlikely that Commissioners will be able to muster the six votes needed to override Hansell.

Also joining Hansell were numerous County officials, from Republican DA Jim Martin to Democratic Sheriff Ron Rossi.

Commissioner Lisa Scheller, part of the five-member coalition who supported a $5 million reduction in employee compensation, filmed part of the news conference and walked out, shaking her head.

District Attorney Jim Martin noted that last month's budget amendment instilled fear of layoffs or pay cuts in the approximately 45 employees under his supervision. "I can tell you that none of them deserve that," he remarked. "They work very diligently and hard on behalf of all of the citizens. He called the $5 million jobs cut, which translates to 100 employees, as unnecessary. "It was not a thoughtful approach," he argued. "If we can't prosecute cases, we can't fulfill our obligations." He commended the "political courage" of the four Commissioners who stood with Hansell

One of these, Dr. Percy Dougherty, a Republican, stated he is now a "marked man," referring to next year's election. A geologist by education, Dr. Dougherty described the budget process in lyrical terms. "The dark clouds that we saw on the horizon weren't the hurricane coming. It was budget season, and it hit us with a flurry, probably more so than the hurricane," he waxed.

Daugherty explained that he supported Hansell's veto because it includes $3.5 million in cuts to non-personnel expenditures. This will still guarantee a $44 reduction to each taxpayer, as was contained in the budget amendment approved by five Commissioners as well as the original budget proposed by Hansell.

Fellow Republican Brad Osborne, who chairs the Board, agreed that the $3.5 million in non-personnel cuts "begins the process of closing the structural imbalance between revenue and expenses in a sustainable way."

Democrat Dan McCarthy, like Dr. Dougherty, also referred to the recent storm. "When you have catastrophes like this, people want government," he stated. "It does have a valid role to play in our society." He complained that the $5 million jobs cut would rob Lehigh County residents of the very people needed to react to crises like Hurricane Sandy. Fellow Democrat David Jones called the indiscriminate jobs cut too much of a "blunt approach."

Commissioners are scheduled to vote on overriding the veto at their November 14 meeting.

The Commissioners who support the $5 million jobs cut are Vic Mazziotti, Scott Ott, Michael Schware, Tom Creighton and Lisa Scheller. Executive Hansell claimed that only Creighton honored his multiple requests for a meeting, although this was disputed by other Commissioners who complained they were not invited to the news conference.

Just Call Me Kreskin

Bill Hansell

On July 30, I told you that Lehigh County Commissioners would eventually name Bill Hansell as the interim Executive to replace Don Cunningham. Damn if that isn't exactly what happened last night.

Proof again that a broken clock is right at least twice a day.

I'd like to give myself a pat on the back, but I have a confession. This analysis was provided by a friend who'd prefer to remain anonymous

Hansell: Local Gov't Where Democracy Works Most Effectively

I ran out of space on my flipcam in taping the final remarks of Lehigh County Commissioner Bill Hansell on Wednesday night. If you've attended just one Commissioner meeting in his two years as an appointee, I'm certain you heard him mention at least once that he helped write the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, Penn's Treaty, Northampton County Home Rule Charter and the script to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. And this loquacious Irishman may very well be right. He had a three "quick" points, which were excellent:

"First of all, local government and local democracy is where citizen interaction with our government happens most directly. Whether you agree with the people, whether we agree with them, when you vote, you from 'em. If you disagree, you hear from them. And it's in your face. It's not a letter to Washington. It's not a letter to Harrisburg. It's not a phone call. It's direct and personal, and that's how democracy is meant to work and where it works most effectively.

"Secondly, ... we are about very important things for the quality of life. ... "

"[Third] ..., ninety to ninety-five percent of what we do here has nothing to do with partisan politics. Some would like to make it have something to do with partisan politics, but there is no real Democrat or Republican way to administer and manage a court system. There is no Democrat or Republican way to administer and manage a nursing home or to build a park."