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1. 19%, 24%, 5% — Delaware County’s tax-increase trifecta hits average homeowner for extra $409 annually

By Todd Shepherd
 

The first draft of Delaware County’s 2026 budget proposes a nineteen percent tax increase, a move coming just one year after the county levied a 24 percent tax increase in property taxes for the current year, and a five percent hike the year before that in 2024.

Using the median home value of $255,000 as an example, that homeowner would have had a tax bill of $763 in 2023. If the nineteen percent increase is approved, and when also calculating the increases from the last two years, the same homeowner would have a tax bill next year of $1,172 — a total increase of 53 percent requiring an extra $409 per year.

Why It Matters. The county posted the executive director’s proposed budget online Friday, days after Democrats, who control all five seats on the council, won resoundingly at the polls. Current council member Richard Womack was re-elected, and the county’s controller, Joanne Phillips, was promoted to the council seat being vacated by Kevin Madden, who is term-limited.

Republicans made the 24 percent tax increase for 2025 a central plank of the campaign.

Council members have complained that years of underfunding by previous Republican-controlled councils left the county in a precarious position financially. Yet it’s also clear from the current budget that the top two priorities of the Democrats who swept to power in the November 2019 elections have added to the budget’s bottom line.

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2. Renamed, rebranded, and reduced — What happened to the Philadelphia Museum of Art?

By Thom Nickels

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, now the Art Museum of Philadelphia, has been in decline for a number of years. 

Director Timothy Rub attempted to hold the line and keep up appearances for a good while. To a large extent, he succeeded. Exhibition openings (for the press) were well-organized and still special events with speeches and tables of breakfast delicacies for journalists on assignment. The old guard at the museum took the press seriously, a tradition going back to Anne d’Harnoncourt’s tenure when press events were actual sit-down diners (white table cloths and wine), where a Philadelphia journalist might find him or herself seated beside someone from the Wall Street Journal.

Enter the new CEO, Sasha Suda. 

She was from Canada. The sound of the name caused me to pause. Call it a vibe. I’m not xenophobic but I felt what I felt. The museum continued to have press exhibition openings, and I continued to attend but the new director always managed to be absent, or she managed to speak to journalists at the very beginning of the event before I got there and then retreated to her office. It was a full year or more before I actually saw her. 

About this time, museum press events were slowly changing. They seemed a little hurried and more abbreviated now: I could see that old guard PMA formality was slowly being eroded. 

The new boss liked things simple.

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3. Lightning Round

• A deep dive into Krasner’s third-term win
• Seth Higgins: Reflections from a Pennsylvania veteran
• Gerard St. John: Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima
• Frank Speidel: Why they fought
• Christine Flowers: It’s hard to stomach what the residents of NYC just did
• Kyle Sammin: Eating the seed corn
• Operation Clean Sweep scores a big hit on Philly-area drug trafficking

4. What we're reading

The Supreme Court's October term will have many high-profile cases, but the most momentous of them is the recently argued matter of Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, which challenges the president's claim that he can set tariff rates without any input from Congress. Over at the Free Press, Harvard's Professor Jed Rubenfeld suggests that despite his other successes, the outlook is not great for the president's arguments.

One big problem Rubenfeld notes: "As authority for the challenged tariffs, Trump has relied solely on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). But the word tariff never appears in that statute." There are other problems, as well. Tariffs could be Trump's signature achievement in his second term, but depending how the court rules, it might require doing it the old fashioned way: by working with Congress.