Published Thursday, May 16, 2002
GREENVILLE
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Ideas include annexing land
Herald Staff Writer
As it has dealt with the town's fiscal crisis, Greenville council has encouraged input and suggestions from residents.
Council has gotten what it asked for, in the way of well-attended meetings with a heavy dose of public comments -- not all of them nice -- and, recently, through detailed analysis and recovery plans offered by residents.
Longtime resident Dick Miller, who runs Keystone Research Inc. in the Greenville Business Incubator, gave a presentation on the borough's fiscal decline Monday at a meeting sponsored by the Greenville Area Chamber of Commerce. Miller, a former reporter and business leader who has been active on various boards and committeesand consultant, spoke for about 45 minutes, outlining four decades of bad luck and poor fiscal decisions that led to the borough's recent entry into the state Act 47 program for financially distressed communities.
On Tuesday, longtime resident Alton Oakes got about 10 minutes at a council meeting to outline his proposals for borough growth. Oakes made it through his introduction and two of his three proposals. He presented council members and the media copies of his six-page report.
"Mr. Miller made an excellent presentation last night on Greenville's reluctance to improve itself and keep up with the progress of the country," Oakes said. "In reality, nothing has been done for decades to keep up with progress … The (borough's) tax base has been falling while the cost of operation has been increasing and this is the basis for part of our present financial condition."
Here are Oakes' proposals, which he said he hoped could help make Greenville a "vibrant, financially secure city" again in five years:
"Annexing property … (would) build the borough tax base," he said. "There are three primary tracts of land which need to be annexed before they are sold. First is the former Water Plant on Hadley Road (in Hempfield Township). Second is the Sewerage land and adjoining lot on Hamburg Road (in Hempfield Township). Third is the land that the borough owns on the West Jamestown Road between the road and the river," he said.
The Greenville Municipal Authority voted last month to market the 190 acres it owns on Hadley Road, in prime commercial property across from Wal-Mart. That land sale could generate millions.
During his presentation, Miller said one of the contributing factors to Greenville's decline was the outlawing of "piecemeal annexation" in the 1960s. Before then, residents from neighboring townships could petition to become part of the borough and the borough could approve the annexation without the township's approval. Now a majority of residents in both communities must approve an annexation. The borough's growth, in terms of area, came to a halt when piecemeal annexation was outlawed, Miller said.
Miller said outlawing piecemeal annexation contributed to Greenville's stagnant tax base, which has decreased $2.1 million since 1974. From 1970 to 1998, 69 annexations across the state were proposed on a local ballot and 39 -- or 57 percent of them -- were OK'd.
There is no requirement that the land to be transferred to another unit be contiguous to the unit's existing boundary, according to the state Constitution. To get a proposal on a ballot, petitions must be signed by registered voters comprising 5 percent of the total votes cast for the office of governor in the previous gubernatorial general election in the communities affected, the Constitution says.
Miller said state law prohibits charging some customers higher rates based on where they live, but Oakes said the matter "has not been investigated thoroughly."