A State College Borough Council member faced backlash this week from colleagues who said he misrepresented their views on filling vacant staff positions while speaking on a local radio show and gave the impression that deliberations took place in private.
The issue centered on a list of 21 vacant positions to be filled that was shown to council as part of presentations on the proposed 2025 borough budget. Borough Manager Tom Fountaine clarified on Monday that the vacancies were a “snapshot” and that some were already in the process of being filled, some are grant-funded and some, like three police officer positions, are the results of current-year retirements.
Appearing on the Tor Michaels Show on Dec. 3, Councilman Josh Portney suggested that vacant positions could made part-time or that money could otherwise be cut to avoid a planned 3-mil real estate tax increase, which is intended to bring the borough closer to a balanced budget.
“We already have 200-plus employees now. The boat is sailing pretty smoothly,” Portney said. “I know that our departments are crunched because when it comes to staffing, everybody’s always short and there’s always a need for more staff, but I think the question is really some of these new positions that are going to be filled in this new budget are authorizing positions that have not been filled in four or five years, and so looking at whether or not we can make that a part-time, or cut money here, or cut money there, or look at our budget projections and be more accurate with what our budget projections are, I think that’s going to go a long way in decreasing or eliminating this tax increase.”
After Michaels remarked “You’re gathering support with your colleagues on this all, aren’t you?” Portney said “absolutely,” and that he had spoken to council members Nalini Krishnankutty, Kevin Kassab and Matt Herndon the night before.
While he only said he spoke to Krishnankutty and Kassab, Portney suggested Herndon “supported the idea in theory.”
Herndon rejected Portney’s claim at Monday night’s council meeting, where the first 15 minutes were devoted to addressing Portney’s remarks.
“I urged him to listen to my clear statements in public council, not to extrapolate what he wants to be true from whatever basic pleasantries I might exchange with him after the meeting,” Herndon said. “When I support something, I will say so. Anyone who has watched council meetings in the last year should be crystal clear that I have no problem speaking up for myself, and I request that other members of council not attempt to put words in my mouth, particularly in forums where I’m not even present to rebut a false claim. If you do misinform the public about what I support, please correct yourself as publicly as possible.”
Krishnankutty said all council members have a right to express their views publicly, but that she was “really surprised” to learn Portney invoked her name because “this not a discussion we’ve had yet, nor something we have evaluated.” Portney spoke with her prior to Monday’s meeting, she said, and agreed “he had misspoken and it was not his intention to convey that a discussion had happened.”
Kassab, who said he asked questions about some positions that had been open for several years but had made no decisions, said Portney apologized to him on Monday night.
Council President Evan Myers called the suggestion that Portney might have privately secured enough votes to join him “extremely serious,” and that his remarks mentioning other members “have broken the trust of many folks on council toward Mr. Portney.”
“It raises issues about violations of council’s code of conduct and ethics and will require a serious look in this regard as we move forward,” Myers said.
Myers, who initiated the conversation at the start of Monday’s meeting after hearing from the three council members and members of the public about Portney’s remarks, said Portney also may have given the impression that deliberations on official actions were taking place outside of public meetings, which would run afoul of Pennsylvania’s Open Meetings Law.
“The one-off discussions involving deliberations could also be viewed as a violation of the Pennsylvania Sunshine Law, that decisions have already been made in private and presented as fact, and that support for this proposal is already in place,” Myers said.
While noting that Portney is free to voice his opinions, Myers said he believed that cutting back jobs was the wrong tack.
“The approach to slash government jobs without analysis as to the consequences and without regard to the impacts without thinking at the last moment, is precisely what the incoming Trump administration is attempting to do, and I don’t think we want to be there,” Myers said. “Mr. Portney has suggested that the foremost duty of elected officials is financial responsibility. I would say that the foremost duty is the safety, security, welfare, and justice for its residents. Certainly, financial responsibility fits under that rubric and a way to achieve the other, but it also cannot be viewed in a vacuum.
“Further, it’s not financially responsible to eliminate positions and personnel that are critical to providing services to our residents. And in fact, the elimination of some of these positions may cost more.”
He added that current staff who have been working short-handed may have been demoralized by the suggestion that more help wouldn’t be on the way.
Portney said Myers misrepresented his position on filling the vacancies.
“I did not allege or suggest the elimination of any positions. It is a misrepresentation,” Portney said. “I said ‘cut back,’ meaning convert to part-time or look for contracted services. I think that’s clear. I had a conversation with you about this. I even read the tape back and showed this. And so I think it’s a misrepresentation. I’m disappointed by it, but i’ve made my comments clear.”
Council members weren’t the only ones who took issue with Portney’s comments on the vacancies.
The Seven Mountains Central Labor Council issued a statement rescinding its “endorsement and support” of Portney on Dec. 4, saying his remarks were “inconsistent with the values of the labor movement… and inconsistent with the values Mr. Portney claimed when he sought our endorsement in 2023.”
It was the latest dustup involving public comments made by Portney outside of council meetings.
A vocal critic of the Solar Power Purchase Agreement being developed by 11 government entities in Centre County, Portney said on Michaels’ show in August that the project was becoming a “financial scandal” because of questions over legal fees. After Centre Region Council of Governments sustainability planner Pam Adams gave a presentation and answered questions about the SPPA, including the processes for the attorney fees, in September, Mayor Ezra Nanes called on Portney to apologize for his comments, which Portney declined.
When a Right to Know request yielded a text message from SPPA Working Group Chair Peter Buck to Nanes suggesting Portney should be stripped of his COG committee assignments, Portney held a press conference. Though he replied to Buck “That’s an option,” Nanes said he never discussed that possibility with anyone, that he was only acknowledging a friend’s frustration and that he would have explained that to Portney had he come to him first.
That led to a clear-the-air session at a council meeting in November, not unlike the one held on Monday.
“The work of this council must be done in public, not played out with small and limited audiences on for-profit radio stations or in social media,” Myers said on Monday. “It must be approached by council when we’re all together in public so that we can hear all the same information at the same time and we can discuss the issues together in front of the public and they can have input.”
Vacant Positions and the 2025 Budget
State College’s $77 million 2025 proposed budget is, for the third consecutive year, structurally unbalanced, with projected general fund expenditures of $40,574,496 and recurring revenues of $38,144,587. It will use $2,429,909 from reserves to cover the gap.
A 3-mil real estate tax increase is included as a step toward balancing the budget in the next three years. Fountaine previously said that State College did not raise taxes for three years and used reserve balances and one-time funds to lessen the financial impact of COVID-19, but that borough policy requires a balanced budget. To achieve that, a tax increase is proposed for 2025, likely for 2026 and possible for 2027.
This year’s proposed increase works out to about $15 a month per household, Myers said on Monday.
During a budget presentation earlier this fall, Fountaine displayed a list of 21 vacant positions to be filled. Myers noted that they mostly are not new positions, but ones that have not been filled for a variety of reasons.
“I want to emphasize that the slide that was used to present the budget in November was a snapshot,” Fountaine said. “It was not an ongoing reflection of where we are in this process. Several of those positions have been filled, several others we have offers currently pending and we are in the interview process to fill a number of those vacancies… Some of those vacancies are fairly recent in occurrence.”
Among the vacant jobs are social worker and civilian response officer positions that are grant-funded and would not yield any savings if left unfilled.
Three open police officer positions are the result of retirements, and Fountaine said two more retirements in the police department are planned for 2025.
“Although we still have an active civil service list, we are literally at the end of that list,” Fountaine said. “And so we are right now advertising for civil service testing. And that test will be given early in the new year and will be used for hiring police officers under our civil service regulations in 2025. We certainly do not recommend reducing that number.”
The assistant borough manager job has been vacant since Tom King’s retirement in 2021.
“The assistant borough manager was intentionally left vacant while we worked hard to fill other positions first, so that the work that needed to be done in those areas was being done, but we do need to fill the assistant borough manager position,” Fountaine said. “It is an important part of our municipality and one that has been in place for quite a while now, going on about 20 years.”
Another long-term vacancy is borough engineer, which hasn’t been filled since 2020. The borough has used an outside firm for engineering services since then.
“We have had great service from Gwen Dobson Foreman over the past four years, but the borough engineer is a civil engineering position that provides design services, but also manages projects and a number of other functions,” Fountaine said. “And we currently have other employees within the public works department, that are performing parts of two different jobs to fill that work.”
Other vacant positions range from IT systems administrator to affordable housing staff to public works laborer to senior planner.
Herndon pointed to delays in completing priorities like the long-running borough zoning rewrite as a reason the positions need to be filled.
“If we had more staff we could move on [the zoning rewrite], and that is a basis for getting more revenue in, which is a basis for not having to raise taxes in the long term,” Herndon said. “New zoning won’t fix everything but it’s it’s a crucial first step to getting more tax dollars in the door without raising taxes on current residents… Zoning that encourages new building here can can lead to a town where inflation raises costs but new tax revenue from new building keeps up with this and means that we aren’t forced to choose between cutting services and raising taxes.
“I don’t want to be pennywise and pound foolish with this budget, cutting jobs that might actually end up reducing pressure to tax in the long run. Our main costs here are roads, pipes, police, trash. I don’t think our residents want these services to degrade, so, even though it hurts to raise taxes, I think it’s the only reasonable option right now.”
If council wants to consider questions about whether the borough needs fewer, more or different positions, the end of the year in the final days before a budget needs to be passed is not the time to do it, Myers said.
He committed to working with Fountaine to include those and other questions raised by council members on meeting agendas in 2025.
“We need some work sessions to consider all these different things,” Myers said. “… All these types of questions are certainly open for discussion, whether most of us think we should be doing one thing or another, but … that’s doing our jobs, is considering those things. But if we do it at the last minute, with the clock running — we’re not like Congress, we can’t decree that the clock be stopped. They can stop time, but we can’t, so we’re going to have to move forward with this, but I think that we need to have some work sessions to do this, as we get into the new year, to consider all these different things.”
Borough Council is scheduled to vote on the final 2025 budget during its meeting at 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 16.
