On November 3rd, the residents of the Borough of Steelton have the ability to elect 4 new council members to our local government. These 4 seats make up a majority of the 7 seat council and can play a huge role in how our local government moves forward.

Monday October 5th is the last day you can register to vote in the general election. For information about voting or registering use the following links:

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I am one of 7 candidates listed on the ballot for the general election this November, and hopefully I will be one of your four elected council members come January.

Over this past year, starting in February, I began my journey toward this goal. I began attending each and every Council meeting that has followed, as well as engaged each and every council member currently holding a seat, some of the borough staff, and residents. My goal was to sit back and watch the processes at work and learn as much as I could. In that time I have seen some things I liked and some things I thought could have been handled better.

Transparency

Everyone throws around the word transparency when it comes to government. These days the public has many ways to get insight into the inner workings of government, specifically the Right to Know law.  As everyone is aware, over the last two years, Steelton has lacked minimal transparency by not transcribing previous meetings from audio tape to paper. I have found it very difficult to prepare for holding office because of this. My overall thoughts on this is that it should have never happened.

What is encouraging out off all of this is that the members of council and staff that I have talked to currently have a plan in place to resolve this and all parties are very adamant about not allowing the current meeting minutes to fall behind. Moving forward, we should see the previous minutes being accepted at each meeting as well as older meeting minutes being approved.  I am happy to know that if elected, all of this will be behind the Borough so we can all focus on other important issues at hand. Although transparency doesn’t and shouldn’t end with just meeting minutes.

New Borough Manager

Besides all of the feelings on the process of how our new Borough Manager was hired, I can honestly say I am very excited to work with Mr. Brown. Over the past two weeks since his hiring was announced, Doug and I have talked several times and we had finally had the chance to meet this week. Most of our conversations were related to the upcoming Water Authority meeting on October 12th, but we also had the chance to talk about how he saw the Borough moving forward. I think Doug has some excellent ideas and we just need to figure out how to make them reality.

One of the main points Doug made to me was his goal to be as transparent as possible. Typically when someone says that to me I take it with a grain of salt, but Mr. Brown took it upon himself as one on the first things as Borough Manager to have a meeting with Erik Arneson, the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records. Mr. Brown requested this meeting so he was fully aware moving forward with how to address and comply with RTK (Right to Know) requests from the residents and the media. This shows me that he has a great interest in not allowing past issues to affect the Borough of Steelton moving forward.

I urge the residents to give Mr. Brown a chance and allow some flexibility in these first few months. From an outsider perspective, there are many things that need to be corrected before Doug will have a chance to work on his own agenda for the Borough. To be a little more specific, there are several vacancies in key positions within the Borough (Public Works and Codes) that need fulfilled, past meeting minutes need transcribed, as well as a stack of RTK requests that need to be answered.

Transparency and the Borough website

Over the past two months, I have worked directly with the council and the staff on updating and helping to manage the content on the Steelton Borough website. With my history and background in information technology and web development, I have been able to assist the Borough at no cost to the residents. One of the first changes that was made was an overall cleanup of the code from page to page. While users of the site will not see any difference, it allowed the standardizing of areas like the menu on every page, which allows adding content to happen more efficiently. Here are just a few areas of improvement on the Borough website that I have assisted the staff and council with:

• Overall text and formatting to make the site user friendly, inclusion of general images on pages.
• Inclusion of monthly calendar of events on homepage of site.
• Inclusion of easier to see and read notices on homepage of site.
• Inclusion of all of the meeting agendas from 2012-2015 for the Borough and Water Authority.
• Testing and verifying all links and email addresses on site.
• Assisted in compiling list of all meeting minutes and cancelled meetings to be posted on website.
• Had general conversation with Codes, Fire, and Police Departments on how to utilize the website moving forward.

Overall, the changes have been improving what information is currently available. Moving forward, regardless if elected to council or not, I would like to help the Borough in include more content to the website, to make it mobile friendly, and more interactive for the residents. I see the website as a way for the Borough to engage their residents, and hopefully it can be made into a tool that is current and continually updated with progress taking place in the Borough. The most important aspect moving forward needs to be creating a system where the staff has a direct and simple way to update the website themselves. This will allow the Borough to quickly and easily add new information and content to the website.  Both the former and current Borough Manager were in agreement that this would allow them to quickly and more efficiently deliver information to the public on a day to day basis.

Important Water Authority meeting October 12th

On October 12, 2015, the Steelton Water Authority will be having their normal scheduled meeting. One of the topics for discussion is a 2.1 million dollar modification to the water filtration plant. This modification is being proposed to rectify the issues in relation to DBP (Disinfection Byproducts) violations. Over the past year, the Authority has been implementing several procedural changes at the plant in an attempt to resolve these DBP violations. These procedural modifications have reduced the levels of DBP, and the water plant has met or exceeded all of DEP’s requirements laid out in their original consent order, but we still have work to do. The Water Authority staff and lead operator have made vast operational improvements over the last year to ensure that our water is far better than when DEP issued its violation letter. However, there are key infrastructure improvements to the plant that have to be made to ensure our water is 100 percent compliant with DEP standards. The only way to fully address Steelton’s water issue is to make capital improvements to our aging water plant.

The Water Authority and their engineers discussed these changes in both the May and August Authority meetings. These options will once again be addressed on October 12 at 5pm. I know many residents are concerned about the quality of the water and I highly recommend that all residents attend and provide public feedback to the Authority on their thoughts moving forward.

Conclusion

I would like to thank the current council and staff for allowing me to be involved and assist where I could. I hope that the residents will allow me the opportunity to do more over the next 4 years by electing me to the Steelton Borough Council on November 3^rd. I encourage any residents to send me an email or give me a call at 717-329-6567.

Feel free to call me with concerns, to get to know me, or just to talk.