Sentinel Weekend Update: AHEC could complement regional attractions
Print
Share
Email to a friend
Add This
Feeds
Local News
Article RatingCumberland County commissioners expect a significant return on what has certainly been a significant investment in the Army Heritage Center Foundation and its mission to raise construction funds for the completion of the Army Heritage and Education Center campus.
Not only did the county donate the land for the 56-acre AHEC site in Middlesex Township back in 1999, it has funded everything from foundation salaries to operating expenses since 2001 using hotel tax revenue.
The foundation draws 30 percent of the initial 2 percent from the county’s 2.5 percent lodging tax, a fee added to hotel room bills. In 2007, a little more than $1 million was generated by the tax, which was at 2 percent then, providing AHCF with approximately $310,000.
That allocation has gone up every year from the roughly $240,000 it received in 2002 — the first full year the county collected hotel taxes — to more than $253,000 in 2005 and $278,000 in 2006, according to Omar Shute, executive director of Cumberland County Economic Development.
Shute’s office is responsible for allocating the funds once it receives them from the county treasurer’s office.
“This year it’s probably going to be more than $310,000,” he said, citing increased lodging revenues in Cumberland County from steady hotel numbers and escalating room rates.
Seidle Memorial Hospital to add state of the art medical facility
Work is under way to create a respiratory therapy center in Seidle Memorial Hospital in September.
Currently patients are forced to travel to the Philadelphia area to receive this in-patient treatment. The Mechanicsburg center will be the only one in the Harrisburg area that specializes in ventilator rehabilitation.
Fox Subacute Management purchased the building on April 23 from Pinnacle Health System for $3.5 million.
“We are a subacute ventilator facility,” said Terri Herd, director of marketing for Fox Subacute. “We take patients that can’t breathe on their own. They come to us directly from the hospitals. We are licensed as a skilled nursing facility. We have an aggressive (ventilator) weaning program. We also offer many services that cater to the patient that will not be able to be taken off a ventilator.”
Herd added that the center will be unique because it is the only licensed center in central Pennsylvania that can provide dialysis to the ventilator-dependent patient.
“For years, our owner has seen the need in central Pennsylvania for a facility, and the Seidle building fit our need,” Herd noted. “And we’re extremely excited. The need is just so incredibly great.
“We plan to open with 20 beds and then go up to 50 to 60 beds when we’re running at full operation.”
Assessors take advantage of technology to conduct reassessment
A new computer imaging tool called pictometry is changing how Cumberland County assessors conduct property reviews.
“This technology has allowed us to do field reviews in a more expeditious and cost-effective way, and with a higher degree of accuracy because we can see all the properties in the county,” said Chief Tax Assessor Bonnie Mahoney.
Integrated with county mapping and geographic information system (GIS) databases, the pictometry system provides oblique, or angled, high-resolution aerial photographs, assessors can check against property records for the county’s 2010 reassessment.
The assortment of views, including the traditional overhead, affords them the ability to see anything that may have been added or altered on a house or building, Mahoney explained. Pictometry’s Electronic Field Study software allows a variety of measurements to be taken directly from the image, including height, distance and area as well as elevation and bearing.
“We don’t have to do as many drive-by visits,” Mahoney said, which equates to a substantial fuel savings.
Perry reassessment on track
Perry County tax assessors are nearly a third of the way through phase one — property review — of a 2010 county reassessment.
“For the most part, from a scheduling standpoint, we’re on track,” said Chief Tax Assessor Randy Waggoner. “We’re very pleased with property owners’ reactions.”
Field work is set to wrap up in Marysville and Rye Township this week, with plans to move on to Duncannon and Spring Township next, he explained.
“We will have pretty much of the central and southeast complete,” Waggoner said.
County commissioners agreed to the project, an update of the 2000 reassessment, at the end of January. Officials have said the decline in the county’s common level ratio, a measure of the discrepancy between its market value and assessed value, was the main reason for initiating it.
“The bottom line is fairness,” Commissioner Stephen Naylor said.
Property assessments have stayed the same over the entire decade, while sale prices have increased, which creates the possibility that lower-valued properties will shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden, officials noted.
“It’s something a lot of people dread hearing,” Naylor said. “The focus is not to raise taxes, it’s to bring about fairness.”
