Editorials from around Pennsylvania

Editorials from around Pennsylvania:

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PUTTING CHILDREN ON THE PATH TO COLLEGE OR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION IS GOOD FOR THEM AND FOR PENNSYLVANIA, April 29

… For most students and their families, it’s not just a matter of which college offers the best education, or where the college is located, or which has the most beautiful or well-appointed campus.

The deciding factor - or at least one of the deciding factors - may be which college offered the best financial aid package, and which college’s tuition, room, board and fees will be the most manageable.

Money has to be part of the calculus now because college debt in the United States is no trifling matter. Depending on which report you favor, Pennsylvania ranks either first or second in the nation among states for college debt.

LendEDU puts Pennsylvania in the No. 1 spot - a truly dubious honor. It says the average debt per borrower in this state was $35,185 in 2016. It also said that 69 percent of Pennsylvanians graduate with debt.

According to the Keystone Research Center, tuition and fees in Pennsylvania have increased 66 percent in the last 15 years, and median student loan debt is up 27 percent since 2000.

As a consequence, students are graduating from four-year colleges with crushing debt loads that make it far more difficult for them to get home mortgages, start businesses and take jobs that might yield long-term career rewards but lower pay in the short term.

Technical education is an excellent alternative to a four-year liberal arts education - especially as Pennsylvania companies are eagerly seeking highly skilled workers - but technical colleges aren’t free, either.

Which is why we think the Keystone Scholars initiative holds promise.

Whether a child is destined for Millersville University or Elizabethtown College or Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, a Keystone Scholars grant would set that child on his or her path.

Torsella told the LNP Editorial Board that the starter deposit money could be used until the child turns 29 for expenses directly related to postsecondary education, which would include vocational and technical training. Parents who wanted to add to it would open a 529 savings account, a state-administered, tax-advantaged savings plan.

(A side note: Torsella suggested that we need a more inclusive term than “college” for postsecondary education and training, and we agree. The British call it “tertiary education,” which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. “Further education” is probably too vague. How about “essential education,” given that getting a diploma after high school dramatically impacts a person’s lifetime earnings? If you have a snappier suggestion, please send it to us in a letter to the editor.)

We’ll be watching to see how the Keystone Scholars pilot pans out. Torsella compared the starter deposits to the savings bonds he used to receive from family members growing up. They were the “world’s worst gift to a kid,” he joked, but they helped to set the expectation that college would be part of his future.

We got those savings bonds, too, but we know that not everyone did or does. Helping to raise the expectations of children across Pennsylvania strikes us as a good idea for the commonwealth, which will benefit if its young residents are prepared for careers that will afford them healthy incomes.

Even if families can only contribute small amounts to their children’s 529 savings accounts over the years, the seed money may be enough for expectations to take root.

If the Keystone Scholars program is to become a statewide reality, however, it will require the passage of Senate Bill 1130 or House Bill 2248. Republican Sen. John Gordner, of northeastern Pennsylvania, and Republican Rep. Duane Milne, who represents Chester County, are leading those legislative efforts.

We’d urge the members of the Lancaster County delegation to lend these bills support, and readers to encourage their lawmakers to do so.

Torsella said the money for a statewide Keystone Scholars program will be generated by investment earnings on a guaranteed savings program established by the state Treasury - not from the commonwealth’s general fund budget.

None of the other states - such as Maine and Nevada - that have established universal children’s savings accounts use state funds, either.

A report on such accounts by The Pew Charitable Trusts cited research done by William Elliott III, an associate professor at the University of Kansas. Elliott found that children “who have even small savings accounts for college are seven times more likely to attend and graduate from college than those who have no savings accounts.”

That’s an impressive finding. We hope Pennsylvania parents and lawmakers are impressed, too.

__LNP

Online: https://bit.ly/2w57Txp

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DON’T BUILD MORE RED TAPE INTO LERTA, May 2

Mayor Joe Schember has made an early priority of expanding a tax break program for new construction in the city. That would require the approval of all three local taxing bodies - the city, Erie School District and Erie County.

There are complications, including the school district’s concerns about forgoing any new revenue at a time when it’s just emerging from its financial crisis. Now an Erie County Council majority has proposed new complications that we believe would undermine the program’s appeal and complicate its administration.

Currently, the Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance program in the city provides a 10-year property tax break on new construction on a diminishing scale in LERTA’s target area, primarily the inner city. Property north of the Bayfront Parkway is excluded.

Schember proposes expanding the program citywide, possibly even to the bayfront, and to make property improvements fully tax-exempt for the full 10-year period. The aim is to spur new investment that would boost the city’s prospects and pay off for the taxing bodies in the long run.

Extending LERTA exemptions to the bayfront gives us pause. The district contains some of Erie’s most desirable real estate and has already been subsidized by taxpayers in various forms. Further incentives seem questionable.

But we support in concept Schember’s proposal for the rest of the city. High property taxes are among the impediments to luring investment in the city, and mitigating them to change the equation for homeowners, businesses and developers is a sound rationale.

When officials first met on LERTA in February, Scott Maas, director of the Erie County Assessment Bureau, presented data about how LERTA has affected development in the city over time. When a citywide LERTA was in effect previously, he said, it prompted a substantial uptick in new construction and renovations.

A majority on County Council also supports the concept. But in a recent letter to Schember, four council members - Carl Anderson, Kathy Fatica, Carol Loll and Scott Rastetter - proposed attaching strings to that support.

Specifically, their approach would require property owners to repay the tax breaks - on a sliding scale - if they “left” the city after the tax breaks expire. That strikes us as unwise and unnecessary.

It’s unwise because it would add red tape and uncertainty to the program at a time when the city on a variety of fronts is encouraging investment and seeking to strengthen its real-estate market. The legalities also would have to be explored.

It’s unnecessary because the proposal doesn’t really align with how LERTA works. If a homeowner, business or developer invested in ways that increased a property’s assessed value, the increased value would remain after the tax break expired, whoever controlled the property.

__Erie Times

Online: https://bit.ly/2rdUehW

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WE NEED TO HAVE A CONVERSATION AFTER GRANDVIEW INCIDENT, April 29

There are any number of better ways Grandview Golf Course could have handled the slow pace of play, if that was indeed the concern, on April 21.

Here’s a thought for the owners:

Approach your customers, hat in hand, and say, “Folks, we screwed up.”

Explain that, yes, you approved their party to play with five - that’s on you - but there was a frost delay that morning, and now the course is packed with grumpy golfers piling up at the first tee.

“So we’re looking for volunteers to help us speed things along. Could we please treat your party to lunch and drinks in the clubhouse this afternoon, and then have you back at another time - again, on us, of course - for your round of golf?”

That would have been one approach to try, if the issue was the golfers’ pace and not their race or gender, as appeared to be the case to the five black women singled out.

It appeared to be the case to a lot of people as it blew up across the country last week.

That includes a member of the party behind the women, who’s on record saying their pace was just fine and his group never had to wait for them.

These women don’t sound like duffers.

They’re members of Sisters of the Fairway, a local women’s golf group that has been around since 2008 and are familiar with golf etiquette.

They asked for and received permission to play as a group of five - golf groups are usually limited to four - and they kept the group playing ahead of them in their sight at all times, skipping hole 3 to keep up, they said.

Again, there were any number of ways to deal with an overcrowded course that day.

But we all know how Grandview did handle it.

They zeroed in on these women, and called the police on them.

The women included York County’s NAACP chapter president Sandra Thompson, who said they were repeatedly singled out and confronted for slow pace, starting on the second hole, when former York County Commissioner Steve Chronister, who identified himself as Grandview’s owner, approached them

She said Chronister suggested they leave and he would refund their money, but Thompson told him they were members and wanted to continue playing.

Three members of the group left before completing nine holes because of the “wrongful treatment,” according to Thompson’s post, but the two remaining were confronted again by Chronister and a group of other men before teeing off on hole No. 10.

Thompson shared a video from the exchange, which includes a man who identifies himself as Jordan Chronister, Steve’s son and co-owner of the club, telling the women to remove themselves from the premises.

“We’ve asked you three times now to remove yourselves from the premises, and you have yet to remove yourselves,” Jordan Chronister said to the women in the video.

Thompson said police were called, and they waited and spoke to the officers, who were respectful. The women left, and no charges were filed.

At one point on the video, Steve Chronister can be heard telling his son to back off, gesturing to Thompson and saying, “It’s what she wants. It’s what she does for a living.”

If by that he means standing up against discrimination - fighting for people who are targeted, scapegoated and treated differently because of the color of her skin - well . yes.

That’s what Thompson does, and thank God for it.

One of her fellow golfers that day was Sandra Harrison, who said she appreciated the viral reaction - which was been swift and brutal - but was sad this was still an issue in 2018.

We agree.

In fact, this black eye to York County was delivered just days after two African-American men were hauled out of a Starbucks in Philadelphia for doing just what white people tend to do - hanging out.

The coffee-maker responded by announcing the closure of more than 8,000 U.S. stores for several hours next month to conduct racial-bias training for nearly 175,000 workers.

What’s Grandview doing in response to its own PR disaster?

Not nearly enough, as far as we can tell.

For her part, Thompson suggested a community dialogue to make sure nothing like this happens again.

Absolutely.

It would be even better if Grandview and the Chronisters made it happen.

__York Dispatch

Online: https://bit.ly/2rkYKw7

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PHILLY’S URBAN GARDENERS DESERVE A THANK YOU, NOT AN EVICTION NOTICE, April 30

When the rest of us saw abandoned lots covered with discarded tires, clothes, household trash, and weeds, urban gardeners saw hope.

They gathered together, threw out the garbage, uprooted the weeds, and planted grass, flowers, herbs, and vegetables. They installed benches, split-rail fences, and hanging baskets. They dug their hands into the earth and came up with what staff writer Samantha Melamed called “green monuments to a neighborhood’s civic history.”

But now, as the city’s real estate markets are picking up, many gardens are under threat of being sold for development, and could soon be covered over with bricks and cement.

According to Jennifer Greenberg, executive director of the Neighborhood Gardens Trust, there are more than 400 community gardens in the city, many on land owned by the city, School District, or nonprofit groups. But about 150 of them are vulnerable to private or sheriff’s sales. The land could be lost forever to the gardeners, who do not own or lease it and don’t have the money to outbid developers.

Should they even have to?

They’ve already improved their neighborhoods at a time when nobody wanted these lots. Not the owners, who abandoned them. Not the city, which couldn’t maintain them.

But the gardeners did. Fortunately, some are getting help.

The trust is in the forefront of helping gardeners lease or acquire the land and follows up by helping them be good stewards. Since 2012, the trust has preserved 38 gardens and wants to help preserve 55 more by 2019. The group provides liability insurance, monitors gardens, and refers gardeners to education and technical assistance from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. The trust even analyzes gardens for preservation based on several factors including whether they are in gentrifying areas, low-income neighborhoods, or areas that lack access to food stores and parks.

On another front, the Public Interest Law Center has been fighting to save gardens and recently trained a team of volunteer lawyers to help out.

If the gardens are owned by the city, the city ought to give or lease the property to the gardeners as long as they meet the Neighborhood Gardens Trust’s very good criteria ranging from gardeners’ capacity to be responsible to the condition of the soil.

There is a tremendous public good to community gardens, starting with the words community and garden. They are patches of green, a source of food, peaceful contemplation, and social connections. They absorb storm water, reducing flood damage. Academic research shows they’ve even made neighborhoods safer.

The city should honor all that and more. Greenberg rightly argues that the city should see gardens as a permanent fixture in neighborhoods and not an interim use of fallow land awaiting development. The city should find a way to protect gardens from sheriff’s sales, speculators, and developers, as well as help out the trust and other reputable nonprofit groups preserve these green spaces.

As Philadelphia digs itself out of a long decline, it cannot lose such a vital part of its character. We all can take a lesson from the gardeners and look past the garbage to see the hope.

__Philadelphia Inquirer

Online: https://bit.ly/2I3kd6f

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PENNSYLVANIA OVERDUE TO GET BETTER ABOUT PROSECUTING HATE CRIMES, April 30

In 2016, a 14-year-old white high school student in Northampton County targeted a 16-year-old black youth for harassment in a racist video. He called him a racial slur, made racist references to Kentucky Fried Chicken and welfare, and shared the result of his disgusting handiwork to Snapchat.

Sounds like a hate crime, right?

But local law enforcement didn’t think so. It overlooked the hate component of this awful instance of bullying and cyber-harassment.

It fell to the black youth’s attorney to make the case that the offense involved ethnic intimidation. His successful argument prompted the county prosecutor to authorize a hate crime charge in the case.

But as PennLive’s Ivey DeJesus reported last week, that’s an all-too-common occurrence.

Police logs across Pennsylvania are filled with scores of incidents in which a bias against someone’s race, ethnicity or religion are noted in a crime report. But, for reasons that range from the failure to file hate crime charges or those charges becoming a bargaining chip in plea negotiations, they seldom result in convictions.

That means they stay out of state crime statistics. And that, in turn, means Pennsylvania, a state of 12.7 million, continues to have a chronically low annual reporting rate of hate crimes to the FBI.

Pennsylvania’s 61 reported hate crimes in 2016 fell well below those reported in similar-sized states. That’s fewer than even Utah, which has a population one-quarter the size of Pennsylvania’s.

“Absolutely the numbers should be higher,” Sgt. William Slaton, who oversees hate crimes for the Pennsylvania State Police, told PennLive.

Intelligence reports received by state police shows these incidents are on the rise. “They are going up, but unfortunately the numbers are not reflected adequately,” Slaton said.

According to those on the ground, two factors appear to be driving the under-reporting of hate crimes in the state.

1. A lack of training? Technology or both?

As DeJesus notes, the FBI’s hate-crimes statistics are based on reports submitted by the state police, which take the data from information gleaned from law enforcement agencies across the state.

While departments routinely respond to incidents that are booked as hate crimes, at some point between the initial arrest and court disposition the hate-crime charges are dropped.

Officials cite a number of reasons for that. As DeJesus notes, prosecutors are sometimes willing to drop a hate crimes charge. Other observers point to police attitudes, arguing that local police departments fail to recognize when hate crimes occur or to identify them that way.

The State Police say the agency is now investigating whether the problem is one of training, one of technology, or a combination of the two.

According to Slaton, the State Police are updating their record management system and implementing a new statewide system for police agencies to report crime. That should take care of the technological side of things.

More stubborn is the problem of underreporting by local law enforcement agencies. of the 1,463 law enforcement agencies across the state that submitted numbers on crimes last year, only 20 submitted hate crime incidents reports.

There’s only one way to increase sensitivity, and it’s much the same as repeated practice leads one to play Carnegie Hall: Through training, training, training. Local police agencies must be trained to recognize hate crimes in their communities and how to confront them.

2. A weakness in state law.

Gary Asteak, the attorney in that Northampton County case, told DeJesus that he believes the lack of recognition of hate crimes is rampant across Pennsylvania law enforcement.

“The deeper you dig you find instances of this everywhere, but you find it was swept under the rug or handled informally or hushed up,” Asteak said. “No community wants to have a reputation of being deemed racists or having racist elements. Who wants that?”

He blames Pennsylvania’s low reporting rate on a lack of recognition or sensitivity to hate crimes. Asteak compares it to the #MeToo movement.

“I think it takes folks like my clients to stand up and say, ’Hey wait a minute. We don’t like what is going on and we are going to do something about it,’ ” he said.

The issue there, according to Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo, is the narrow definition of the ethnic intimidation statute. It’s an “add-on” charge that increases an underlying offense by a degree. For example, ethnic intimidation would raise a summary offense for a criminal mischief charge to a third-degree misdemeanor; an ethnic intimidation charge would raise a first-degree misdemeanor terroristic threat to a third-degree felony.

“We have to prove that the person acted with criminal intent because of malice toward a specific racial, ethnic or religious group,” Chardo told PennLive. “There are some hurdles that have been placed. It could have been drafted more precisely.”

That means state lawmakers need to go back to the drawing board to craft a law that closes any loopholes and gets to the heart of the under-reporting issue. Unfortunately, the Legislature doesn’t have the greatest track record in this regard.

Efforts in the Legislature to expand the language of the law - and protected classes - have failed over the years. The most recent reform was overturned by the courts on procedural grounds.

Since then, efforts to expand protection under the law have failed both in the House and Senate. Crimes motivated by political orientation, gender or sexual orientation bias are not protected under the ethnic intimidation statute.

Pennsylvania is one of 15 states that offer no LGBT inclusion under hate crimes law. That’s inexcusable in a state that prides itself as being the cradle of American liberty.

Equal protection under the law means equal protection - for everyone. As last year’s riots in Charlottesville and elsewhere made clear, hate is alive and well in America. If we fail to prosecute it and confront it, it’s at our eternal peril.

__PennLive

Online: https://bit.ly/2FvqcLz

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