Either way, this bill has bi-partisan support with the majority of PA House members understanding that there needs to be a statewide approach to property tax reform.
Below is a news article and a press release regarding these votes:
I'd like to see us increase the odds of this moratorium getting put in place. To do so, please contact PA State Senators Pileggi and Scarnati at the websites below (note that these are "Contact Me" forms as they do not have public emails addresses):
Please ask these senators to support a property tax reassessment moratorium in Allegheny County.
Here is what I wrote:
Here is what I wrote:
Dear Sir,
Please take a moment to read the linked letter below. It has a thorough explanation of why I support the Senate freezing the reassessments that took place in Allegheny County.
The results of this reassessment will hurt those people you wish to help the most- the middle class. We cannot afford what is happening here with the taxes being pushed upon our already overburdened checkbooks.
Please support a moratorium on the Allegheny County Reassessments.
9 comments:
Don't expect Mr. Gambino, Ms. Posti, or Ms. Klein to participate in your letter writing campaign. Will your critics hijack this entry or will they finally see the light and join in?
While you're at it, let's petition the people in HArrisburg to give us--the taxpayers--control over local school boards. Its the damn fox guarding the henhouse with the current sytem.
You said it, 12:35! Many school boards---including ours---are out of control!
Can someone supply some addresses?
What would be really great - if the media pocked up Tom Moertel's excellent graphs on how obviously skewed to 2013 numbers are and published them for the whole county to see. But they won't, because their reporters generally wait for some PIO to hand them the 'news'.
Then those charts might make their way to the senate where they'd be hard to ignore.
Personally I'm not giving my vote to either Smith or D Raja! I'm tired of the endless BS, then onto business as usual.
What I'd really love to see is a part-time legislature. Harrisburg is a bloated rotting corpse of bureaucracy and ego. I say enough is enough.
Along with writing to Senators Scarnati and Pileggi on the issue of reassessments, I hope Blog readers will write Senator Charles T. McIlhinney Jr., Chair of the Government Committee, and urge him to move on SB21, the Voters' Choice Act, which was introduced in the Pennsylvania Senate by Senator Mike Folmer back in January of 2011. This bill would make it much easier for legitimate 3rd party candidates to appear on Pennsylvania ballots. As noted on the website of the Pennsylvania Libertarian Party, "Under current law, the Republican and Democratic party candidates are required to collect between 1,000 and 2,000 signatures to get their names on the statewide ballot, while all others have been required to collect as many as 67,000 signatures in recent years. But under the Voters' Choice Act, independents and candidates of political bodies would need to collect the same number of signatures as the candidates of the two old parties, and once a third party registers 0.05% of the electorate as members of that party (approximately 4,200 voters), their candidates may be nominated according to the party's rules, and at the party's expense, without having to collect signatures."
I called Sen. Folmer's office this morning to inquire as to the status of this bill and was told it is still pending in the Government Committee, but not high on Sen. McIlhinney's agenda.
The D's and the R's in Pennsylvania are terrified of this legislation, as it might result in breaking their stranglehold on power, and offer the voters some actual choices as well as challenging "business as usual," as the poster of 11:13AM puts it. While the two parties talk a good game about their differences, when push comes to shove the differences are only in the execution of power; neither one is concerned about individual rights, which are becoming like small islands of freedom in a sea of government.
Pennsylvania has the best legislature union dues can buy.
4:08 What you've heard – that government union bosses of our one-size-fits-all school system thwarted a push for school vouchers. That is true. They didn't defeat us at all. We got a huge expansion of school choice, and it will serve even more children than the voucher plan for which we fought so hard for so long.
We have the single largest increase in Pennsylvania's Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) program since its inception in 2001. The doubling of this school choice program to $150 million in this year's state budget will enable 20,000 to 60,000 more children to use privately-funded scholarships to escape some of the most violent and worst performing schools in our state. In comparison, it was estimated that previously considered voucher proposals would help 2,200 students in the first year and 10,000 in the second.
I'd be more happy if they'd pass a moratorium on Act 1 exceptions.
Why does everything have exceptions now? Isn't a law a law?
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