NEWS RELEASE

November 15, 2012

CONTACT: Scott Ott, vice chairman Lehigh County Commissioners

ScottOtt@gmail.com 610-810-1688

Lehigh County to Actually Spend Less in 2013

Reform-Minded Commissioners 'Change the Conversation'

Lehigh County government will actually spend less in 2013 than it budgeted in 2012, thanks to a group of Commissioners who used a new strategy to change the conversation.

Commissioners Lisa Scheller, Tom Creighton, Mike Schware, Vic Mazziotti and Scott Ott -- after studying the failure of their predecessors, for years, to make any line-item spending cuts -- adopted a strategy that set broad spending and taxing parameters, then let the Executive decide where the cuts should fall.

"This is what a board does," Ott said, "We don't micromanage the staff. We set boundaries, then the Executive sets priorities within those boundaries. We didn't get all we wanted, but we got 70 percent of the spending cuts and 60 percent of the permanent tax cuts, and that's a good start. After all, if we hadn't done this, spending would have increased by millions next year."

The Commissioners' amended budget (passed on a 5-4 vote on October 24) which would have cut taxes and spending by $5 million, failed to overcome an Executive veto by just one vote last night. Ott said Republican Commissioners Brad Osborne and

Percy Dougherty, who voted with the Democrats, either didn't understand the two options before them, or preferred the one that spends more and taxes more.

"Before the public spoke last night, Chairman Osborne made a speech explaining why he was supporting the County Executive's plan that frankly left me scratching my head," Ott said. "Brad seemed to think that the Executive's plan spends $3.5 million less in 2013, and that it reduces the decit more than our plan. It doesn't do either of those. He was off by millions of dollars. If I had known Brad Osborne just didn't understand the two plans, I would have made a greater effort to explain them to him."

While a $3.5 million spending cut sounds big, Ott pointed out that the county will spend just $150,000 less next year than the 2012 budget, and that creeping personnel costs will rapidly push the 2014 budget higher if the Executive and Commissioners fail to make structural changes in the coming months.

"Our most important work begins now," he said. "We need to develop a framework to make county government more sustainable, accountable, focused and effective, and that means digging into the structure and the rules that control how the government operates. Last night was a good rst step, but we have a lot of work to do."

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