As we near the end of the year and welcome the holiday season council, staff, and I are nearing a more complete version of the 2023 budget for the community.
Earlier in the budget season, it looked like we would be able to balance the budget without a tax increase. However, as everyone dug deeper into that initial budget, we realized that grant funding was being used to balance the budget for a single year and a single year only. As you may suspect, balancing a budget with recurring yearly expenses on the back of one-time grant funding is fiscally irresponsible and not sustainable. This reality requires us to change the way we view the 2023 budget and the opportunity it presents to the community.
If you are reading between the lines here, you recognize that I am discussing the two words every elected official, of any party, hates: tax increases. To be very clear, the cost of operating the borough cannot be met by the current tax millage without making significant cuts to programs, staff, and services, which would ultimately lead to a decrease the quality of life in the borough. For me, that is not acceptable. We must build a budget that serves our residents in a way that exceeds their needs and expectations in a way that encourages people to continue to want to call Lansdale their home.
In moments like this, governments are presented with two options:
1) Increase taxes enough to fill the gap and ask residents to pay more for the same services, or
2) Look closely at how they can enhance services comprehensively for the community and fund those changes properly so that residents get more for their investment and increase the value every person gets when they are in Lansdale.
For me, we are at that investment moment. Our community has grown 22% in a decade while our police department has grown by less than 1%. Other departments across the borough are also being stretched to capacity due to our growth. This is not to say growth is bad or wrong, but to Just simply state that we must continue to at least meet the needs of our residents. To do that, we must invest in the borough and increase the value of all that we offer our community and to keep the borough thriving.
Critically, for the police department, this means hiring more officers and dedicating officers to traffic control. If you were to come to any public safety meeting, you would hear residents talking about speeders and traffic management. The reality is that there is not enough staff to constantly be managing traffic. By hiring three entirely new officers to our staff, we will be able to dedicate staff to those efforts and begin to help manage our traffic challenges. This level of investment, fundamentally, improves life in the borough for all people and makes our community a better place to call home. If we stop at “just filling the gap” we are only asking for residents to pay more for a service that is not meeting the needs of our borough. We must move beyond that.
Similarly, our public works and electric department is facing the uphill battle of restoring and repairing aging infrastructure that every resident knows is overdue for maintenance, if not outright replacement. We cannot just ask them to do more with less. They need proper investment to repair our infrastructure so that we have roads that people appreciate, electric systems that are reliable and a sewer that does not create sinkholes in our community. Again, when we repair and re-build our infrastructure, we are not building it for today — we are building it for the future and for the longevity of the community, as a transformative investment that generates long-term sustainability.
That all being said, it is unrealistic to continue to rely solely on taxes to build and re-build our community into the future. There is too much work for that to a be a reasonable solution. We need to think differently about how we can approach investment in the borough. Every year, I have beat the drum of exploring new revenue sources for our community by building new necessary services. It is time for us to bring some of these opportunities to life. The most important, and most transformative, would be the outfitting of a 5G or WiFi system. As I have said before, this is a necessary service that would allow us to improve multiple services in the borough while also allowing residents to opt-in to basic internet services at the same or less price as Comcast and Verizon.
No one takes a tax increase lightly. As residents, elected officials and staff also feel the pinch when taxes go up and we recognize just how hard that can be on every person in our borough. However, we must approach these borough wide challenges with unbending, unflinching purpose and solve them aright. We cannot kick these cans down the road any longer and we must build a sustainable budget that meets the needs of this community. As your mayor, I am dedicated to being a doer of deeds and I am going to strive valiantly to ensure we meet the needs and expectations of every resident both now and in the future.
(Mayoral Musings is a weekly op-ed column submitted to North Penn Now, courtesy of Lansdale Borough Mayor Garry Herbert. The views expressed are his own.)
See also:
Mayoral Musings: Remember to Vote on Nov. 8
Mayoral Musings: Commercialized EV Charging
Mayoral Musings: Lansdale Ballot Drop Box Opens This Weekend
Mayoral Musings: North Penn Cuts Ribbon on Renovated Knapp Elementary
Mayoral Musings: Budgeting for More Police Officers
