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** 1. Chester County keeps choosing excuses over accountability ([link removed])
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By Beth Ann Rosica

The Chester County Board of Elections’ meeting on Friday to certify the election went down exactly how I expected — lots of emotional public comments, an acknowledgement of the “serious error”, deflected by a statement that voter services staff are “fallible human beings”, culminating in a certification of the election along partisan lines with Democratic Commissioners Josh Maxwell and Marian Moskowitz voting yes and Republican Commissioner Eric Roe voting no.

Yet, just because it was what I anticipated does not mean I was happy about it — quite the contrary.

Why It Matters. Chester County pretends it wants to operate similar to a corporation. It is the only county of its size that employs a Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Experience Officer (CXO). The CXO was just added this year at an annual cost of over $200,000 to taxpayers — and one of her responsibilities is to supervise voter services!

None of these expensive “corporate” positions apparently did anything to prevent such a monumental error. Worse yet, these costly “executives” have not responded in a way consistent with corporate America.

A corporation has a board of directors and executives answer to them directly. When a massive mistake is made in a corporation, heads will roll — as they should.

Continue Reading ([link removed])



** 2. Delaware County Council encourages economic apartheid ([link removed])
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By Wally Nunn

Upper Darby and Radnor sit just a few miles apart in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. One is working-class. The other is one of the wealthiest communities in America. Yet the family in Upper Darby pays roughly twice the effective property-tax rate of their neighbor in Radnor — despite earning less than half as much.

That single fact exposes the quiet cruelty baked into how Pennsylvania funds schools and local government.

Why It Matters. For many Upper Darby families earning $50,000 or less, the property tax bill consumes fifteen to twenty percent (or more) of their entire income before utilities, insurance, or groceries. In Radnor, the typical homeowner pays under nine percent of household income in property taxes.

And the final insult? Despite shouldering a far heavier burden, Upper Darby School District spent $14,728 per student in 2022. Radnor spent $25,264 — 70 percent more.

The system doesn’t just fail to be progressive. It is aggressively regressive. Lower property values trigger higher effective tax rates, which forces working-class towns to tax their residents harder just to deliver basic services. Wealthier towns tax heavily, hoard commercial ratables, and lavish their schools with resources.

Continue Reading ([link removed])



** 3. Lightning Round
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* From the Editors: It’s time to end the gerrymandering wars ([link removed])
* Ben Mannes: Trump’s crackdown defies critics as crime rates drop ([link removed])
* Rep. Abby Major: Shapiro promised transparency. Instead, Pennsylvanians got secrecy. ([link removed])
* Sen. Tracy Pennycuick: A no-new-tax-increase budget moves Pennsylvania forward ([link removed])
* Christine Flowers: When I’m 64 ([link removed])
* Paul Davis: Beware of fake U.S. Postal Service emails during the holiday season ([link removed])
* Stew Bolno: Doing the opposite — George Costanza and Donald Trump ([link removed])
* Jeff Hurvitz: Kennedy should follow the science on vaccines ([link removed])


** 4. What we're reading.
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The Covid-era scam around the Minnesota non-profit, “Feeding Our Future” was already known to the world when Kamala Harris chose that state’s governor, Tim Walz, over Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro to be her vice-presidential running mate in 2024. But this week, the size and scope of the theft by organizations and people within Minnesota’s Somali community has exploded across the headlines of even those organizations that would normally be loath to tarnish a progressive Democrat’s reputation.
The New York Times reports that ([link removed]) “more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating,” according to federal officials. There was a lot of scammy activity during the rollout of Covid relief funds, but Minnesota is showing itself to have been head-and-shoulders above the rest in corruption. The scale was so great that we have to ask ourselves whether Walz knew about it and ignored it or was too dumb to pick up on it — either answer is bad and makes you wonder what Harris ever saw in this guy.



** 5. Correction
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In last week’s edition of the Weekly Reads, we inadvertently credited an article to Todd Shepherd. The actual author was Guy Ciarrocchi. We regret the error.


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— The Editors at Broad + Liberty
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