Community college boosters: Hoist on their own petard

The sponsors of a proposed Erie County community college have been, to paraphrase Shakespeare and Hamlet, embarrassingly hoist on their own petard. Their dubious proposal is broadly based on hypothetical grounds that a community college would serve as an engine for economic development in Erie’s depressed economy and jobless environment by training workers for new jobs in a transformational workplace.

It ignores the reality that key existing employers are laying off workers right and left, and/or relocating to other venues, like Mexico, where business and industrial costs are much lower. Who’s to say there will be jobs here for prospective community college grads to fill? Quite the opposite. Proponents have coated their advocacy with a slick façade of spun rhetoric while omitting any contrary viewpoints, giving their enterprise a false aura of legitimacy.

The move for development of a community college in Erie, one of 38 of the state’s 52 counties without one, has been spearheaded by a self-anointed group called Rethink Erie. It consists of various special interests including the Erie Regional Chamber and Growth Partnership and its chief officer, Jim Dible, retired publisher of the Erie Times-News. Though the proposal is controversial within the community, you’d never know it based on what you read in the Times-News, which studiously ignores the widespread opposition in its one-sided coverage.

Institutional proponents - a laundry list of the area’s leading elitests, including the Times Publishing Co. and its political weapon, the Times-News - have contended from the outset that community college costs, whatever they may be, will be met without burdening the county’s taxpayers. That has become their mantra of sorts.

For example, in an editorial published March 28, 2010, The Times-News opined: “With its due diligence to develop a ‘pro forma’ on projected enrollments, revenues and expenses, Rethink Erie has the necessary numbers to persuade Erie County Council and Erie County's school districts to join as partners to sponsor the college, with no burden on taxpayers (my emphasis).

And First Term County Executive Barry Grossman, in lockstep with Rethink Erie and the Times-News, who has made the community college his administration’s signature symbol, has echoed that enticing but dubious promise. He was quoted by the Times-News as saying that “… gaming revenue, endowment money, tuition, scholarships and state and federal grants will pay for the college; taxes won't be raised, he pledges.”

Even longtime retiring Schools Superintendent James Barker has opted in. Under state law, the school district is a potential co-sponsor of the community college along with the county. Barker was quoted as saying that “The need for a community college isn't in question, the cost is…But it's clear that if we do this right, it will add no burden on our taxpayers." (Barker denies having any interest in a job with the prospective community college. Judith Miller, hired recently by Rethink Erie to serve as coordinator for the proposed community college, may be a candidate for the top job there. She retired in June as superintendent of the North East School District).

But once the “pro forma” was tested, proponents have had to back off that key no-tax claim, as discussed below. And therein lies their embarrassment and dilemma.

Typically, the cost of maintaining and operating a community college in Pennsylvania derives from a three-way split: one-third, from the students via tuition; one third from the coffers of the principal sponsor, the county (and, possibly, one or more school districts); and the final third from the state.
Since the Erie County’s budget is already perennially overcommitted, any additional revenues would have to come from increased property taxes.

Unless the first two funding sources convince the third source - the state - that they can uphold their end of the financial plan, the state, represented by the state board of education, won’t approve the required application for establishing a community college here, thus negating the state’s one-third share of funding.

The key to moving Rethink Erie’s proposal forward earlier this year was approval by county council of the application to the state for establishing a community college in Erie County. That question came to a critical vote before council in late June. The outcome was in serious doubt because at least three of the council’s seven members (one abstained on conflict grounds, a no-vote under parliamentary rules) weren’t willing to entertain even the remote possibility of saddling taxpayers with any part of funding for the proposed two-year institution. They were justifiably skeptical of proponents’ claim that county property taxpayers would not be exploited.

But that wouldn’t seem to be a problem, because proponents of the community college, mostly stakeholders who stand to profit financially or personally - directly or indirectly - have argued, as shown above, that local costs of establishing and maintaining a community college can be magically met through non-tax revenues.

These include a share of gambling proceeds from the Presque Isle Casino estimated at $1.5 - $2 million annually, a one-time grant of $1 million from the Erie Community Foundation, and other lesser sources. Taxpayers, they have claimed from the outset, need not apply. Based on these sources, they assert, the county’s annual one-third share would approximate a manageable $1.5 million, sufficient to support the college. But that’s obviously unrealistically low.

For example, with a student load of around 700, close to that estimated for Erie County, Butler County provides its highly successful community college, the oldest one in western PA, with a $4 ½ million subsidy from property taxpayers each year to keep the institution going, spokesman Bill O’Brien told me, about which more below.

Co-incidentally, on the eve of the county council vote last June, the prolix propagandists at the Erie Times-News shifted into high gear, disgorging a barrage of articles and editorials attesting prospectively to the dire consequences should council fail to authorize the application seeking permission to establish a community college. One of the editorials ended on this ominous note: “If council rejects the community college, remember whose votes torpedoed Erie's future.”

Shoving journalistic ethics and balanced and fair coverage out the door, the Times-News has lavishly promoted the community college in its news and editorial columns, while ignoring the vast reservoir of suppressed opposition to it within the county. Ironically, in June, the online version of the Times-News - GoErie.com - featured a running survey on its editorial page asking readers to vote on whether or not they agreed with the paper’s position on the community college. The last time I looked, just before the survey was yanked from the web site, the vote was 83 percent of respondents opposed to the Times-News position and the community college, 17 percent agreed!

To ensure that proponents’ claim that county property taxpayers wouldn’t be burdened with having to pay perpetual operational and life cycle maintenance costs of the community college, if established, Councilman Joseph Giles offered an amendment to the proposal at the June council meeting. It expressly provided that property tax revenues would not be raised for those purposes. As amended by Giles, the proposition, which may otherwise have been narrowly defeated, was approved by county council with near-unanimity.

Since the county council’s action putatively met the non-property tax criterion of Rethink Erie and its various sycophants, one would assume they would have applauded it. But not so. Instead, they condemned Giles’s amendment. That betrayed their true intention of railroading the community college through the approval process, then subsequently seeking to impose property tax increases to help fund the county’s one-third share.

County Executive Grossman admitted as much when, in an astonishingly obtuse move, he went before the Erie school board on June 30, hat in hand, to beg for a healthy chunk of school funds to help finance the community college. He sought a commitment to contribute $250,000 each year for the next ten years. Asked by a board member whether that meant county council would reverse itself and rescind the Giles amendment prohibiting the use of county property tax money for the community college, Grossman, according to a report in the Times-News, replied: “I have to be frank with you. I'm trying to use you people as leverage."

And in an interview the following day with the Times-News, Grossman let the cat irretrievably out of the bag. He was quoted as saying that “if school districts, private businesses and others throw their financial support behind the community college, it could make it harder for County Council to maintain its position regarding county tax dollars.” Nevertheless, the school board politely but firmly rebuffed Grossman. He told the Times-News he would ask all the other school districts in the county for contributions as well, but the prospects there are even less promising.

While previously maintaining the pretense that county tax money would not be used to support the community college, Grossman has now made it clear he intends to renege on that “pledge.” Indeed, he has already done so by supporting a $29,800 grant from the county to Rethink Erie. That group, in turn, is using the taxpayer money to contract with a consulting firm to prepare an economic impact study needed for state-mandated approval of the community college. It was, in effect, a sole source, non-competitive no-bid contract; not illegal, but under the circumstances, highly questionable.

In a column following county council’s June vote, Pat Howard, managing editor of the Times-News and lead tenor in the community college choir, dismayed by the turn of events, bewailed council’s adoption of the Giles amendment. In its aftermath, he warbled a convoluted recitative: “With an assist from state Sen. Jane Earll, who led the push to attach some gambling money to the project, and from the folks at Rethink Erie, who commissioned new research on the subject,” Howard wrote, “ Grossman, the county executive managed to lower projections for the local tax share to a nice round number. Zero (my emphasis).”

However, Howard added, “The gambling revenue the college is banking on is likely to remain relatively static over time, or could even drop in the face of expanded competition in the gambling business, while the local share of community college costs will be subject to the normal cycle of inflation...As things stand now,” Howard wrote, “a community college at some point would either have to cut costs or find new, sustainable sources of revenue other than taxes if the gambling cash doesn't cover its nut." Nut?

The dilemma emerging from Rethink Erie’s and County Executive Barry Grossman’s untenable proposition is that (one) there are no “new sustainable sources of revenue” available; (two) politicians and bureaucrats are congenitally incapable of cutting costs from their pork buffets, and (three), by Howard’s own admission, gambling revenues are certain to be insufficient. That leaves property taxes to foot the community college tab a certainty, an outcome its proponents have publicly ruled out, but privately endorsed, until Grossman allowed the feline to escape. And that’s the petard of their own devise on which they are hoist.

Community colleges are a positive force wherever they exist, and would prove to be so in Erie. But the threshhold consideration here is whether this county’s property taxpayers can afford the one proposed by the Rethink Erie cabal given the uncertainty of its purported utility and the inhospitable socio-economic circumstances prevailing here.

That combined with the proliferation of other unique higher and alternative education options available in the county, both technical and academic, renders their proposal based upon its inevitable burden on taxpayers redundant. And the overriding taxpayer sentiment in Erie County is a resounding “No!” There are too many other higher needs and priorities clamoring for finite county resources.

Lost amid clouds of effluvia generated by Rethink Erie, the Times-News and their single-minded cohorts, are other more realistic and palatable options. These include a promising one which was briefly explored locally but summarily rejected by the county’s control barons aiming for a power grab. They prefer a puppet institution readily susceptible to various forms of insider manipulation.

This option stems from an impressive presentation made in Erie earlier this summer by Butler County’s widely-respected community college system (not covered by the Times-News) offering to establish a satellite college in Erie like those highly successful ones it has already placed in Lawrence and Mercer counties. Those are in addition to five more it is in the process of installing throughout the region.

Under the Butler model, the set-up, operational and maintenance costs by an operator with proven competence and success would be far less than establishing one in Erie County from scratch. It would also genuinely, not falsely, eschew the need for property tax revenues. The non-tax sources cited by the Rethink Erie axis such as casino revenues, Erie Community Foundation and other private grants and donations would truly suffice to cover all costs, given the efficiencies obtainable within the established and highly qualified Butler system, negating any need to use county property taxes.

Butler Community College has already made impressive inroads by establishing partnerships with a handful of institutions outside its geographical bounds in western Pa. like the one proposed with Erie County, including Edinboro University, and in western New York. But in yet another one-sided news article in the Erie Times-News, a Rethink Erie spokesperson blithely dismissed these key developments, and others like them, as irrelevant to the higher need for a community college.

The facile rejection by Rethink Erie, County Executive Grossman and the Times-News of the superior Butler model demonstrates that they are more concerned with incestuous empire building at taxpayers’ expense, than they are with providing affordable higher vocational education for lower income residents aimed at bestirring an economic and industrial renaissance, and reversing joblessness in Erie County.

As of this writing, several weeks before this article was published, the resolution of this issue was still very much in doubt. Would the state approve the county application if county council remains steadfast in its stand against the use of property taxes? Or would council ultimately bend under the high voltage pressure applied by Rethink Erie and its principal lobbyist, the Erie Times-News, and concede to the tax pushers? Stay tuned.