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1. Delaware County’s bond issuance cost $2.1 million more than necessary, local analysis finds

By Todd Shepherd
 

Delaware County could have saved $2.1 million dollars when it issued bonds this summer but chose not to, preferring instead to go with private entities as opposed to a regional government-associated entity set up for the sole purpose of saving governments money on loans.

That’s according to a loan analysis document from the June meeting of the Delaware Valley Regional Finance Authority, or DVRFA.

When Delaware County decided this year to issue bonds through private lenders, it could have borrowed from the DVRFA but decided to take a more costly route, the DVRFA analysis concludes. After accounting for all items associated with the bond offering like capitalized interest, underwriting fees, and “other issuance costs,” Delaware County “paid $2,124,851 more debt service than a comparable [DVRFA] Loan,” the analysis concludes.

Why It Matters.  The analysis also notes that law firm Ballard Spahr acted as the “bond counsel.”

Ballard Spahr has political ties to the current council. According to Councilwoman Christine Reuther’s LinkedIn resume, she worked for the firm for about five years ending in 1993. In a more recent show of those close connections, however, Ballard held a fundraiser for Reuther in 2019, according to a page from Reuther’s campaign website. Although the advertisement for the fundraiser on the website has since been taken down, it was saved through the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that archives billions of webpages daily to create a historical archive. 

The firm’s political committee gave $2,000 to Council Chair Monica Taylor’s re-election in 2023.

As Broad + Liberty reported in July, the county’s spending on outside, third-party counsel has skyrocketed since Democrats took control of the council after the 2019 elections. In that last year of Republican control, spending on third-party attorneys or law firms was about $400,000. In 2023, that figure had ballooned to $4.5 million — the highest spending of any of the collar counties.

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2. Beth Ann Rosica: U.S. House report vindicates parents who fought to keep schools open

By Beth Ann Rosica
 

This month, almost four years after these tragic events, the subcommittee released the “After Action Review of the Covid-19 Pandemic: the lessons learned and a path forward” report. While there were no surprises in that report for me personally, I finally received some much awaited vindication.

The subcommittee report is comprehensive, as they “sent 100 investigative letters, conducted 38 transcribed interviews or depositions, held 25 hearings or meetings, and reviewed more than one million pages of documents from dozens of custodians” as a part of the process.

The report confirms there was no “science” to support extended school closures, masking, or social distancing. Furthermore, Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to the American public, and state and local health departments blindly followed his guidance. I hope that he is held accountable for his actions.

Why It Matters. These findings reveal that the majority of school districts in Pennsylvania followed not only poor but misguided recommendations — which were not rooted in science — from their local, state, and federal health departments. It also questions whether school districts may be liable for the consequences of extended school closures and forcibly masking children against their parent’s wishes.

Furthermore, the report shows that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) colluded with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a national political labor union, to keep schools closed.

Quotable. “Schools remained closed longer than necessary because of AFT’s political interference in the CDC’s school reopening guidance. AFT is a political union, not a scientific organization, that advocated for mitigation efforts that prolonged school closures — including an automatic closure ‘trigger,’” the report said.

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3. Lightning Round

• Emily Greene: Congress should pass site-neutral policies to lower patient costs and improve access

• Beth Ann Rosica: Math takes a backseat, social justice drives the bus in PA schools

• Ryan Costello: Misuse of opioid settlement funds betrays Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable

• Elizabeth Stelle: Corporate welfare doesn’t work. Cutting red tape does.

• Wally Nunn: Delco council can’t fool all of the people all of the time

• Delco stays silent on mystery $7.6 million that helped backfill 2025 proposed budget

4. What we're reading

Donald Trump is returning to the White House and Joe Biden’s four years of de facto open borders are one of the main reasons why. At The Free Press last month, the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam took a look at the mess on the border and proposed some reasonable steps on how to start fixing it. (It’s what we’re reading now because we’re still wading through all of the post-election articles in open tabs on our browsers.) Biden and Kamala Harris acted as though there was nothing anyone could do to stem the flow of illegal immigration; Salam shows the lie of that with proposed fixes that could restore confidence in our government’s ability to maintain its own borders.