Lehigh County Commissioners General Meeting
6/09/2021: Public Funds to Private Pockets, Incarceration
Date: June 9th, 2021
Everyone is familiar with the expression “Divide and Conquer”, but an older form of the maxim, credited to Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II of Macedon, is “Divide and Rule”. In the U.S. today numerous divisions--worker divided from worker by decades of union busting, racial divisions, division of governmental units by states and within states along lines of urban vs. suburban vs. rural, the division of government into executive, legislative and judicial branches, the division of the national and state legislatures into house and senate chambers--help maintain rule by, well, the ruling class. That ruling class comprises corporate management and ownership and individual plutocrats, plus the politicians that do their bidding. The June 9th Lehigh County Board of Commissioners meeting provided one telling little example of how, at the local government level, legislators are boxed in by the effects of some of those divisions.
Prior to the full Board meeting, the Development and Planning Committee, chaired by Commissioner Amy Zanelli, met via Zoom (same video link as above, start of the video). Two of the bills considered, both sponsored by Zanelli, authorize subgrants of state funds from the Pennsylvania Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program. One of these (Bill 2021-08) would provide $3 million to Air Products for their New Global Headquarters Project in Lehigh County and the other (Bill 2021-09) would provide $2.5 million to Evonik, a large German specialty chemical company, to assist with its project to renovate and occupy the former Air Products campus in Trexlertown. Commissioner Bob Elbich objected strenuously to both of these bills. Speaking to the Air Products grant and citing his background as a small business entrepreneur, Elbich said, “I have a real problem with this. When I saw the numbers, that this is a grant, free and clear, not a loan, for a company that has a net income of $2 billion in a year and there are small companies out there struggling...I find this unconscionable, so I will not be supporting it.” Most of the other Commissioners, while making sympathetic noises about Elbich’s objections, said they would support the Air Products grant. Commissioner Marc Grammes mused, “These are global competitors. The fact that we can keep the headquarters here rather than having a mass exodus to South Carolina like Mack did years ago [actually North Carolina]...I know upstate New York has a lot of enticing things out there for businesses. Everyone’s always in competition for the good things we have, so…” Here we see how the division of the country into states and localities with separate tax systems is used by Capital to extract grants, tax abatements etc. with the implicit or explicit threat of up and moving its facilities and jobs elsewhere. Of course the larger problem is that under our capitalist legal system a corporation like Air Products is completely entitled to do this, even though it has built its business by appropriating and accumulating the surplus value created through the efforts of multiple generations of Lehigh Valley workers. On motions from Commissioner David Harrington both bills were sent without recommendation to the full Board, where the discussion continued in a similar vein.
Over the course of the two sessions we did learn several more things of relevance about the circumstances surrounding these grants. Director Frank Kane of the Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED), representing the County Executive, informed the committee that, despite the wording of the bills, these grants had not yet been applied for and the Board was free to vote them down. He added, however, that the role of the County was to simply support the applications and act as administrator of the grants and that Air Products could, for example, seek the support of another local government. He suggested Allentown, and that they could probably get the grant that way. Commissioner Percy Dougherty noted that these grants were part of a deal to keep Air Products here, worked out in Harrisburg some time ago by State Senator Pat Browne and others. This account perhaps differs slightly from that of Frank Kane that Air Products had not threatened to move, had chosen to stay, something Commissioners Dutt and Hartzell cited as a reason to vote yes. Kane added that Air Products projects it will spend $500 million on the new headquarters and would have had “massive offers” if it went elsewhere. This raises a question. If Air Products is committed to staying and if $3 million is a drop in the bucket compared to both its annual income and its planned spending on the headquarters, then why exactly is it needed? One can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t serve as a symbolic act of fealty, like a tug on the forelock or laying the first fruits of the harvest at the feet of the lord of the manor.
It came out that Evonik is a corporation of similar size and annual income to Air Products, owner of, among other things, a soccer team and 14 coal-fired power plants. Frank Kane did not have information on its planned spending on the refit of the former Air Products campus and said he would get back to the Board on that. Toward the end of the discussion, Bob Elbich acknowledged the point made by Amy Zanelli and others that these are “pass-through grants” made with state monies. He maintained his opposition to the bills, however, saying he felt that an action by the Board would have more impact in registering displeasure about state spending priorities than just calling up state legislators as an individual. He may have won at least a partial convert in Commissioner David Harrington. Harrington said that while “giving away money to wealthy CEOs and multi-billion dollar companies” didn’t “sit well” he worried about losing the third largest employer in the Lehigh Valley. With respect to Evonik, however, he added that “This company is no Air Products” and that he doesn’t want to just rubber stamp state deals of this sort. The second readings of the bills and the final votes are scheduled for the June 23rd Board meeting.
The other major discussion of the meeting occurred during “Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items” and was devoted to the high rate of recidivism among the formerly imprisoned, the difficulties ex-prisoners face in reentering society outside of prison and the role that experiences of trauma play in those difficulties. Defense attorney Ed Angelo of the Lehigh Valley Justice Institute led off the remarks by laying out the scope and costs of the recidivism problem: at Lehigh County Jail, 50% re-incarceration within 3 years; a Univ. Illinois study estimating each recidivism event costs society more than $151,000; Lehigh County annual expenditures of $87 million on Courts and Corrections, 69¢ of every tax dollar, or about $17,400 for each of the 5000 people criminally charged each year. Angelo urged diversion of funds from the DA’s office and Courts and Corrections toward investment in reducing recidivism, strengthening the “helpers” as he put it.. He mentioned, among other organizations, SELF!, a Lehigh Valley non-profit helping women returning from prison, and Promise Neighborhoods. He proposed the establishment of a 911 diversion pilot program similar to the CAHOOTS program of Eugene, OR, that sends teams of medical and mental health responders to emergency calls, when appropriate, as an alternative to police. Eugene and its county spend $2 million annually on CAHOOTS at a savings of over $20 million on police, courts and corrections, ambulances and emergency medicine. One can’t help but note that the amount of money in the Air Products and Evonik grants might do nicely to get such a program up and running in say Allentown. Angelo concluded by asking the Board to create and fund the position of Reentry Coordinator, a request echoed by the subsequent commenters from various non-profits. This seemed to garner support from at least Commissioner Grammes and Commissioner Harrington, who said he had proposed this last year.
Following Angelo, the Commissioners heard from representatives of an array of non-profits involved in helping reentering ex-prisoners. Aside from the aforementioned SELF! and Promise Neighborhoods, these included the Ortiz Ark Foundation and Pinebrook Family Answers. In part, of course, they were there to advocate for funding of their organizations, presumably from the ~$72 million coming to Lehigh County from the federal Covid-19 relief package. Nearly all spoke of the need to address past trauma, including that of imprisonment, as the key to successful reentry and prevention of recidivism. Several related, from personal experience or that of their clients, the very practical difficulties faced when returning from incarceration--the barrier to getting a driver’s license until all outstanding fines are paid and the consequent need for rides to work or job interviews, lack of clothes suitable for a job, lack of food, lack of money, hopelessness leading to reversion to past behaviors including drug use. Pretty much all of those difficulties can be traced to poverty and the stresses and traumas that derive from it, including the special punitiveness our society reserves for the poor when they run afoul of the police and the courts. The straightforward solution to that, the redistribution of wealth and income, albeit largely outside the control of the Lehigh County Commissioners, was not even a non-agenda item.
The opening paragraph could not have summarized the situation more clearly. Unfortunately, both bills (kicking state funds to Air Products and Evonik) passed by 8-1 (Elbich dissented) and 7-2 votes (Elbich and Harrington dissented), respectively, at the June 23 meeting. This is telling of the priorities, attitudes and values of our commissioners. What is in it for them? What are their motivations? We need to expose the truth. "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them." - Ida Wells-Barnett