GOP County Commissioner Candidates Go Head-To-Head

Ding! Round 2.

In their second debate in as many days, Republican Lehigh County commissioner candidates answered questions on spending cuts and the fate of Cedarbrook nursing home with varying degrees of civility, outrage and icy-ness at a forum in Allentown moderated by the League of Women Voters of the Lehigh Valley.

The central issue of the race has been the county’s 16 percent tax hike and incumbent Dean Browning’s vote in October against sending back the 2011 budget to County Executive Don Cunningham for steep cuts. Among the eight candidates for four at-large commissioner seats is the slate of Scott Ott, Lisa Scheller, Vic Mazziotti and David Najarian, which has targeted Browning for defeat because of that vote. At Tuesday’s forum, they wasted no time in criticizing him and the county budget process.

Ott said Browning and the other commissioners failed to use “the most powerful tool that the county commissioners have” – sending the spending plan back to the county executive with instructions to come back with a budget with no tax increase or a smaller tax increase. “Then [Cunningham] is forced to go back and make those cuts,” Ott said.

Browning explained that the need for a tax increase was several years in the making because structural problems in the budget had been masked by the county’s use of a tax relief fund to reconcile a deficit and that tax relief fund was almost completely depleted. He said he has initiated efforts to cut back on salary increases for county employees – both non-union and union – to get costs under control.

Brad Osborne, who hasn’t taken sides in the feud – said one key to a better budget process is for commissioners to make their expectations clear to the county executive early.

“The commissioners responsibility is to communicate to the administration NOW that they expect cost reductions to be an integral part of the budget process,” said Osborne, who is currently a South Whitehall Township commissioner. “I will push for zero-based budgeting which is a line by line review of the budget. This approach ensures that programs are not automatically funded year after year just because they were funded at one time.”

Asked what specific budget cuts they would favor, Ott and Najarian mentioned the $350,000 in reductions that the commissioners had considered last fall to bring the tax hike down to 13 percent. They did not mention what those cuts entailed.

Najarian, a Lynn Township supervisor, said he was the only candidate who had actually cut taxes, which his township did by reducing spending 21 percent during his six-year term. “We did this by making our providers compete,” he said.

Scheller picked up on that, saying: “We can start bidding out our contracts instead of year over year over year allowing the same contractor to come in with no-bid contracts that tend to take advantage of the county.”

She and Mazziotti said the commissioners shouldn’t be going line by line to make cuts in the budget but rather do what managers in private industry do: instruct the department heads to cut a certain amount from the budget and let them propose the reductions.

When asked for specific cuts, Mike Welsh said the county should look at whether it should be running and subsidizing the Lehigh Valley Zoo. The county could reduce community grants and explore privatizing Cedarbrook, the county’s nursing home.

All the candidates said they’d be willing to discuss the possibility of privatizing Cedarbrook but none more enthusiastically than Mazziotti, who was part of the effort to sell Gracedale, Northampton County’s nursing home, before he retired as that county’s fiscal affairs chief.

“I’m absolutely beyond a doubt convinced that the absolutely right thing to do is to sell the county nursing home,” Mazziotti said. “Keep in mind that two-thirds of the counties in Pennsylvania do not own a nursing home, and we do not have old people dying on the streets in those other counties.”

Osborne said he’d only be willing to consider selling Cedarbrook if he’s sure that the residents would get the same or better quality of care for less cost to the county taxpayers. 

Browning said, “We’ve been fortunate that we’ve been able to run the nursing home – and we have two of them – a little bit better than our counterparts to the east, Northampton County.”

He said if the Cedarbrook facilities in South Whitehall Township and Fountain Hill start to be more of a drain on the county, it could sell off one and keep the other as “a place of last resort” for elderly county residents.

The debate ended with each of the candidates saying – in some cases, grudgingly – that they would support which ever Republicans win the primary on May 17. Commissioner candidate Norma Cusick was not at the forum.