Published Wednesday, April 17, 2002
SHENANGO VALLEY
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Preliminary reports start coming in
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WORK-IN-PROGRESS CAN YIELD RESULTS NOW, KUGLER SAYS
Herald Staff Writer
Although the goal of members of the Shenango Valley Intergovernmental Study Committee is to determine if Sharon, Farrell, Hermitage, Sharpsville and Wheatland should merge or consolidate, the study consultant said their work should start paying dividends before that question is answered.
As study subcommittee chairmen presented final reports Tuesday, consultant Alan Kugler said there appear to be ways for communities to share services and apply jointly for state funding.
Noticing that four of the five communities listed street sweepers on their wish lists of new equipment, Kugler suggested the communities team to seek state funding.
"I would like to see the municipalities act," said Kugler, director of the Pennsylvania Economy League's Northwest Division in Erie.
He also suggested monthly meetings for the heads of the public works departments; he said such meetings have improved services for members of the French Creek Council of Governments.
Wheatland Mayor Thomas Stanton said the recommendations concerning Shenango Valley Public Library in Sharon and Stey-Nevant Public Library in Farrell -- principally, that they merge -- are not limited to consolidation.
"Whatever you decide to do with the libraries, you can do now without being one city," he said.
Kugler said, acting now on some of the recommendations before the committee has completed its work would show the process has been beneficial.
"Now's the time to be really moving," he said.
The recreation and libraries and streets and traffic-signals subcommittees presented full reports Tuesday, the community and economic development subcommittee offered a summary, and the fire subcommittee gave a verbal report, which did not offer any recommendations.
The reports are preliminary and will be shaped by the full committee.
The reports show some unnecessary overlap: Two subcommittees -- streets and traffic signals and community and economic development -- envision an engineer and code enforcement officers falling under their departments.
Committee members requested additional information be added to reports, and some subcommittees noted that they need to receive information from other subcommittees to fill in some blanks.
But, not all of those blanks will be filled. Some questions can't be answered, Kugler said.
A case in point: how much money a consolidated municipality would receive in federal Community Development Block Grant funding. CDBG funds are used for roadwork, public-service agencies, special projects and demolition among many other uses.
Sharon, Hermitage, Farrell and Sharpsville receive CDBGs each year. Wheatland competes with other non-entitlement communities for a share of Mercer County's allotment.
Factoring in the grants Wheatland has received in recent years, the community and economic development subcommittee said the five communities receive about $1.9 million a year.
Dennis Puko, chairman of the community and economic development subcommittee, said he has tried to find out what a consolidated Shenango Valley municipality would receive from the federal office of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Rep. Phil English's office, but has had no luck.
Puko said he has looked at other CDBG entitlement communities in Pennsylvania and in other states that are roughly the same size as what a consolidated community would be, and they receive between $30 and $70 a person.
The Shenango Valley communities get about $43 a person.
"It's impossible for me to judge what this new municipality will get," Puko said. "I'm comfortable that we will be comparable" to current receipts.
Kugler said the committee will have to make its final recommendations to the municipalities without having all the answers.
Kugler is pushing for subcommittees to finalize their reports, although conflicting schedules make that difficult. The full committee will meet at 6:30 p.m. May 7 in the Wheatland Borough Building to hear reports of the police, water and sewer, finance and government structure and legal subcommittees.
You can e-mail Herald Staff Writer Joe Pinchot at jpinchot@sharon-herald.com
STREETS, TRAFFIC SIGNALS
Streets wish list tops $3.5 million but money scarceThe Streets and Traffic Signals Subcommittee of the Shenango Valley Intergovernmental Study Committee hasn’t even received a cost estimate on repairing Sharon’s streets, and its wish list already exceeds $3.5 million.
That’s what public works departments believe it will take to replace and update equipment and catch basins and to pave streets.
What’s worse, the municipalities do not have the money to buy the equipment or do the work.
"These are not pie-in-the-sky things," said subcommittee Chairman George Gerhart, a Sharon citizen representative. "These are the basics."
The costs do not include state roads, which are the responsibility of PennDOT.
"I can’t think of a street in Sharon that doesn’t need work right now," said Mayor David Ryan. "Some need rebuilt from the ground up."
He said Sharon’s street-repair estimate is likely to top $1 million.
Administratively, the public works departments could save money by consolidating, Gerhart said.
Combined, Hermitage, Sharpsville, Wheatland, Farrell and Sharon have 36 full-time employees and eight part-timers, although some are not limited to street department duties.
The report said the total number of employees could be less under a consolidated municipality because of a "streamlined staffing pattern," temporary part-timers, contracting out some work and more efficient use of some major pieces of equipment, such as using them for more than eight hours a day.
The full committee has set a goal of incorporating all current municipal employees into the consolidated town.
However, the subcommittee recommends the new municipality stop having employees split time between jobs.
The report notes that two Farrell workers also are full-time firefighters and are allowed to respond to fires when working on the streets, and Sharpsville’s employees also work at the water and sewer plants.
Wheatland Mayor Thomas Stanton, whose borough releases one of its street workers to fight fires, said job-sharing is an excellent idea. It assures someone will respond to a fire during the day, when firefighters often are hard to come by.
The report said such job-sharing "is not conducive to an efficient operation."
But the subcommittee is not necessarily against some of the side duties many of the street workers perform, such as putting up and taking down municipal holiday decorations; removing downed trees; maintaining municipal buildings, grounds and parks; and helping with bulk trash pickups.
"They really have to be jack-of-all-trades," Gerhart said.
RECREATION, LIBRARIES
Options abound to meet need for parks, programsThe parks and recreation programs offered by the five communities involved in the Shenango Valley Intergovernmental Study Committee are "widely varied," according to the Recreation and Libraries Subcommittee.
The subcommittee’s charge was to imagine a program where all residents of a consolidated town would not only have access to the same services, but eventually would see more even than what Hermitage has now.
Hermitage provides the "most comprehensive" recreation program, a year-round schedule of classes for all ages.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sharpsville offers only a light-up night at Christmastime, the report says.
As far as playground equipment, Hermitage’s is the most up to date, and meets safety and Americans With Disabilities Act standards. The other communities cannot say the same.
"A lot of the parks and recreation facilities, the equipment will not meet safety standards and will not meet ADA standards," said Mary Bula, committee spokeswoman. "A lot of work needs to be done to bring them up to standard."
The committee made the following recommendations for a new municipality:
The committee recommended that communities looking to rejuvenate their playgrounds -- Farrell is awaiting word on a state grant -- follow through.
The committee said the new municipality should create a recreation program based on one in York, Pa.
Although York’s budget was slashed from $2.1 million in 2001 to $1.5 million in 2002, the city has 24 full-time people devoted to parks and recreation, and facilities such as three community centers, a sports complex with softball fields, batting cages, volleyball courts and a miniature golf course, an ice rink, an outdoor pool and a weight room.
The Shenango Valley has two publicly funded full-timers dedicated to recreation -- Hermitage’s recreation director and Mercer County Regional Council of Government’s parks and recreation specialist.
Most program staffing is done by part-timers, with park maintenance and upkeep the responsibility of city public works employees.
James DeCapua, COG executive director, said a new government should work closely with private providers of recreation activities. He singled out Buhl Farm in Hermitage, which he called the "crown jewel" of valley recreation.
"I understand the endowment Mr. Buhl left is running on pretty rough sledding," said DeCapua, noting that the park was not mentioned in the committee’s report, although the Buhl Club in Sharon is specified.
Pat Woodings of the League of Women Voters of Mercer County said Sharon City School District invests a lot of effort into the city’s recreation program.
"I can’t imagine our school district would continue to do that" if the municipalities consolidated, he said.
The Hermitage and Farrell school districts also participate in the recreation offerings in their cities and in Wheatland.
Concerning libraries, the committee recommended merging Shenango Valley Public Library, Sharon, and Stey-Nevant Public Library, Farrell, and operating both under the same policies and procedures.
The new library should be a department of the municipality, with the municipal government responsible for their upkeep.
A seven-member advisory board should be formed.
Adding the populations of Sharpsville and Wheatland to the library would increase its accessibility to state aid, but also increase the amount of local funds necessary to qualify for aid.
Karen Spak, director of the Sharon library, estimated it would cost more than $150,000 to pay for new books, equipment, personnel and related costs to merge the libraries.
It costs about $545,000 to run the Sharon library, and $100,000 to operate the Farrell library.
COMMUNITY, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Merged city needs fully staffed development officeThe current planning, zoning and code departments of Wheatland, Sharpsville, Farrell, Sharon and Hermitage are understaffed, according to the Community and Economic Development Subcommittee of the Shenango Valley Intergovernmental Study Committee.
While Sharon and Hermitage fully staff those functions, Farrell, Sharpsville and Wheatland spread the duties among employees who have other jobs to perform, and sometimes to public officials.
The subcommittee recommended that a consolidated community create a single department to handle community and economic development, planning, zoning and subdivision ordinance administration and building, construction and health code administration.
"These functions are interrelated, though different," said committee chairman Dennis Puko, adding that staff members could be trained to perform tasks in another area.
The department would work with a number of boards, including a planning commission, a zoning hearing board, a code board of appeals, a board of health, an economic development commission and a redevelopment authority.
While the subcommittee recommends hiring a full-time city engineer -- a position none of the municipalities currently has -- the department also could eliminate duplications of chores performed by the current towns, such as having multiple zoning hearing boards.
A consolidated city likely would be eligible for an annual entitlement under the state’s HOME plan.
"We would be big enough and distressed enough to capture some of that," Puko said, noting that none of the current municipalities qualifies for an annual amount. The communities may apply for HOME grants.
Cities of about the same size of a consolidated Shenango Valley city get between $400,000 and $500,000 in HOME money annually for housing rehabilitation and new construction projects, the report says.
The new municipality should prepare a new comprehensive plan, which would determine development priorities, land-use patterns, and housing, transportation and infrastructure needs, and zoning and subdivision ordinances.
The subcommittee identified a number of sites for economic development projects, including Legacy Commons along Broadway in Farrell, the former Sharpsville Quality Products plant in Sharpsville, Westinghouse Electric Corp.’s former Sharon Transformer Division site and the 84 acres of undeveloped land Farrell owns in Hermitage.
The projects would require about $9 million in work to prepare them for development.
FIRE
Variety of paid, volunteer departments makes the fire question a tricky oneTwo things are clear when it comes to fire protection in a proposed consolidated municipality of Sharpsville, Wheatland, Sharon, Hermitage and Farrell: A paid, full-time department is too expensive and an all-volunteer department is impractical.
Somewhere between those extremes is where the Fire Subcommittee will eventually settle.
Chairman Tom Lally said he needs another meeting of the subcommittee to hammer out a final report, but his verbal presentation Tuesday showed there still are legal questions to be resolved.
The Shenango Valley has four kinds of fire departments, he said. Sharon is staffed around the clock and all of its firefighters are paid. Hermitage pays only a chief and an assistant chief, while the rest of the firefighters are volunteers. Farrell has three paid full-timers, a host of part-timers and volunteers, and Wheatland and Sharpsville are all-volunteer outfits.
The fire departments also have specialized in ways that better serve residents of their community or the whole area, such as Sharpsville equipping its trucks with emergency medical equipment and Hermitage investing in hazardous materials equipment.
Residents are getting a deal. Municipal contributions to each department, not counting fund-raisers and state relief association funding, total $1.4 million a year, Lally said.
"When compared with other communities, the fire budget is significantly lower in this area because of our volunteerism," said the Sharpsville councilman.
But volunteerism is declining. The population is aging, and the amount of training a volunteer must go through and the safety regulations departments must adhere to are increasing, he said.
The committee had considered leaving the current fire departments intact in a consolidated municipality, but that brought up the problem of some residents paying for fire protection that would not respond to their homes. The state won’t allow that, he said.
But, pointed out James DeCapua, Sharon officials have said they’re satisfied with their paid department and are willing to pay the extra cost to keep it.
The municipal boundaries of the current towns could be kept as districts of the consolidated municipality, with each district charged a separate fire service fee, said DeCapua, executive director of Mercer County Regional Council of Governments. That way, Sharon could keep its paid department and pay more money for a higher level of service, he said.
"That status quo would, basically, continue," DeCapua said. "If volunteerism is going to drop off, it’s going to drop off whether you consolidate or don’t."
The committee will seek legal counsel and the advice of a consultant in preparing its report.