The Carbon County commissioners split over their thoughts regarding having municipal officials do presentations at county meetings; as well as post office boxes and the hotel tax contract.

Last Thursday, the commissioners allowed three motions to die for lack of a second. Commissioner Chris Lukasevich has requested these three motions each year since taking office in January 2020 and they have always failed due to no second.

State of the municipality

Lukasevich made the motion to develop a policy inviting municipal elected officials to update the commissioners during weekly public meetings.

“I’ve always said, commissioners don’t run the county, we run or administer or manage county government,” he said. “However, there are no stronger potential advocates for municipalities than the board of commissioners here in Carbon County. …

“I’m telling you, I still have not received full awareness of the priorities, issues or challenges facing our municipalities, and I don’t want them coming to us simply when there’s an issue, because we want to foresee those and mitigate the possibility of those issues or challenges becoming larger than what we may be able to handle, manage or assist.”

Lukasevich added that the commissioners’ meeting is a great platform to allow municipalities to also receive further attention on happenings in the towns due to multiple media platforms attending the weekly meetings.

Commissioners’ Chairman Wayne Nothstein said that no municipality “has ever been denied the opportunity to come to this board as commissioners.”

He cited the Council of Governments, which allows municipalities to work together with each other and the county, but not every town participates.

“Only half the municipalities participate,” he said, adding that of the 24 municipalities that are members of the COG, only about eight show up regularly at the monthly meetings.

Commissioner Rocky Ahner felt similar to Nothstein, saying that townships and boroughs already have councils and supervisors to make decisions on issues within their municipality and felt that Lukasevich was continuing this issue because of his idea to make Carbon County a home rule county.

“We have Council of Governments and any municipality that has question is more than welcome to contact me as I’ve done in the past,” Ahner said.

P.O. boxes

Like the state of the municipality, Lukasevich again made a motion to create a working group to assess the 23 post office boxes in Jim Thorpe that the county rents.

Lukasevich said that the boxes cost the taxpayers approximately $55,000 annually when you calculate the rental fees, plus the lost labor of employees going over to check the boxes daily.

He said that it takes about 15 minutes a day for one department to check its post office box.

He calculated that all departments leaving their office to walk to the post office to check the P.O. boxes totals approximately 13,117 hours throughout the year, roughly equivalent to $53,000.

The annual cost for the box rentals is $2,672.

Lukasevich questioned what boxes could be combined or eliminated.

Nothstein and Ahner again questioned the motion.

Nothstein said he spoke with the departments that have P.O. boxes and most of the people checking them are row office holders or employees who stop on their way to work each morning.

“I understand what you’re saying, and maybe in most of these people that you’re saying that 15 minutes, how many of those you see outside for 15 minutes taking their morning or afternoon break?” Nothstein asked. “That is their break a lot of the times to get out and get some fresh air and I certainly think that is important to the health and mental stability to a lot of these employees. Sometimes, you just got to take that little break, a couple minutes, is going to help.”

Ahner added that “there is time sensitive mail that with the eliminating (of post office boxes) could cause a problem.”

Hotel tax terms

Lukasevich asked that a motion on the agenda to reevaluate the terms of the hotel occupancy tax contract with Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau, the Carbon Chamber and Economic Development Corporation and the county be tabled for two weeks until he could review financials that PMVB just sent him.

Nothstein and Ahner voted no to that motion and then let the original motion die for lack of a second.

“There is a contract in place currently that if broken will probably cost the county, solicitor fees,” Ahner said, adding that he would suggest meeting to discuss the issues before the renewal of the contract.

Lukasevich gave credit to the previous board for negotiating a “tough contract,” and received the deal it did for Carbon County at the time; but he thinks the county can do better moving forward instead of being compared to the other counties under the PMVB umbrella.

“I’m only responsible to the 64,000 residents in Carbon County and their interests and I want to do better by them,” Lukasevich said. “And this is part of that. If I could get an extra $50,000 or $100,000 in revenue to put additional camping sites at Mauch Chunk Lake Park to increase the maintenance that we need to do that out there. Those things would be positive.”

Nothstein, who was involved in the previous negotiations with PMVB over the hotel tax terms, said that the previous negotiations that PMVB held were originally done without Carbon County in mind. He noted that the previous PMVB director went to the other three counties first and penned an agreement that wasn’t consistent with what Carbon wanted.

“It took quite some time to get that agreement,” Nothstein said of the current agreement with PMVB. “I want to be fair to the other three counties involved as well. We should all get our equal shares, be treated equally and they took us last because we had the best deal. They wanted us to just sign off on what the other counties did.”

Carbon County currently receives 20 percent of the first $500,000 collected under the hotel tax, and 10 percent after that.

The agreement was penned in 2018 following two years of negotiations.

For the first three quarters of 2021, Carbon County collected $1,546,905.50 and retained $204,690.55 that was put into the parks and recreation budget for Mauch Chunk Lake Park, as well as $61,976.21 to cover administration fees.