Borough Council Musings

Swarthmore Borough Council

I walked home from the Swarthmore Borough Council work session this warm winter evening, wondering whether I should write up the meeting for the paper. Much of what was discussed I’ve already written about in other recent articles: Swarthmore College’s preliminary final land development plan for a new dining hall and student center (February 28 issue), the ongoing conversation about whether to make the intersection of Yale and Cornell avenues a four-way stop (elsewhere in this issue as well as earlier), a group of fifth graders coming to the General Government Committee proposing an Indigenous Peoples’ Day holiday (also elsewhere in this issue). 

On the other hand, there were some interesting tidbits and new conversations. New to me, anyway. And if this newspaper doesn’t write about them, how will anyone know? I counted four private citizens in the audience tonight. When I walked into the meeting room, a whole bunch of people were crowded into the chairs, but it turned out that most of them were there as part of the Swarthmore College presentation of their preliminary final plan — the second item on the agenda — after which they left, and the room got pretty empty.

An aside: Does “preliminary final plan” sound as odd to your ears as it does to mine? I know what it means, and I think I know that the intention of using words in that way is to be precise. In my ongoing project of seeing the poetry in local government, I’m trying to engage with the phrase as a bit of language that intentionally pulls in contradictory directions in order to affect my emotions under the surface. The poetry of bureaucratese.

My own intention here in this editorial, I’ve decided, is to write more informally and more personally than I usually do in these pages as I tell you about the meeting. Consider it an experiment in ways of letting you know what your government is doing.

Greg Brown, Swarthmore College’s Vice President for Finance and Administration

Somewhat to my surprise, I was moved by the way Greg Brown, Swarthmore College’s Vice President for Finance and Administration, spoke about the college’s preliminary final plan. His language was the opposite of bureaucratese. He talked about what he called a defining moment at the college, when the campus student center, Old Tarble, burned in 1983. He spoke of the need for students to have a place they could gather and relax; about how the current dining hall, which opened in 1965, was designed to serve 900 students rather than the 1,600 the college enrolls now. He told us about the lack of natural light in the basement kitchens. This last detail put me in mind of British novels set during and just after World War II, when former domestic workers decamped for better jobs in factories and left their former employers to discover the dismal basement kitchens of their own homes.

Here’s one interesting detail conveyed by Susan Smythe, the project director (and former Swarthmore council member): Of the five small stone houses near the new project, the college is planning to take down the one nearest the dining center. This former fraternity building will be razed to make way for a better access road for delivery trucks and emergency vehicles, but its roof slate and the stone from its walls will be salvaged and reused. 

After the covey of college folks left, Rick Lee, president of the Swarthmore Fire & Protective Association, used the public comment section of the meeting to relate that the fire company is beginning to investigate “proper procedures and guidelines” in case of a local outbreak of COVID-19. He said the fire company would be working with both Delaware County and local healthcare providers to develop standard operating procedures. I was glad to hear it.

A good portion of the meeting was devoted to a discussion of renewable energy credits (RECs) that the borough buys. This doesn’t mean that energy we purchase comes directly from renewable sources; rather, that these credits support the production of renewable energy more generally. 

This issue had been discussed at last week’s Environment Committee meeting, which I didn’t get to, but as I listened, I began to wish I had. Discussions at committee meetings are usually more complete than discussions at Borough Council, which makes it easier to get a clearer understanding of the issues at hand.

Still, I got the gist of this. Usually, the borough contracts for RECs for two years at a time. But this year, Environment Committee Chair Lauren McKinney reported, the committee voted to ask the council to sign a one-year contract and look for sources of renewable energy more local than the RECs the borough has been buying from wind farms in Texas and Oklahoma.

What “local” means, however, in this case, is less than clear. It certainly doesn’t mean Delaware County. It might or might not mean Western Pennsylvania or New Jersey. Apparently it’s complicated. 

It would, actually, be possible to switch to local RECs immediately rather than spend a year looking into the best place to buy them, as the committee recommends. But the cost of doing that would jump a lot. Currently, our RECs cost $1.40/megawatt hour, or $735/year; switching to local right away would cost $13.50/megawatt hour, or $7,087.50/year. (Later in the meeting, we heard about an exciting new proposal that would boost the borough government’s energy efficiency, thus bringing down the cost of either contract.)

After McKinney reported her committee’s vote, council member Betsy Larsen — also on the Environment Committee — read a statement explaining why she had been the lone dissenting vote on the one-year contract. She wanted the committee to recommend immediately switching to the local RECs, despite the price. Here is part of her statement [edited and condensed]:

“At the time [Swarthmore started purchasing RECs], it was a bold move, a statement of our community’s commitment to the environment and to leading the way. If we’re going to support environmental action, and remain a pioneer and a role model for other communities, we’re going to need to spend money. We’re in a climate crisis. Council has not hesitated to spend thousands of dollars on other immediate concerns, and I think that we should really look at doing that here. To quote both Representative [Leanne] Krueger and Senator [Tim] Kearney, ‘If not Swarthmore, then where?’ ”

In this conversation here in our own borough council room, I saw a microcosm of the struggle playing out in the larger world. Faced with the enormity of the climate crisis, how best to respond? Take some steps, think things through, weigh options — or take immediate and commensurate action now?

Finally — subsiding from that challenging and sometimes contentious issue to a more straightforward quotidian one — Ross Schmucki, who chairs the Public Works Committee, reported that:

Our sewers are being inspected (1/7 of the borough total each year).

The repairs on the wall in Central Park (paid for by the Centennial Foundation) will begin March 9.

Bids are being solicited in preparation for repaving some of our streets later this year, at a cost currently estimated at $211,204.

Here — both for informational purposes and because I think the list is its own kind of poetry — are the names of the streets in line for repair: Dickinson, Columbia, Harvard, Cresson, Dartmouth Circle, Dartmouth Avenue; and possibly — should funding allow — Michigan Avenue and School Lane.

If you live on one of those streets — and if you are reasonably lucky — you can count on a lot of disruption for a short period of time, followed by years of a smooth, quiet ride.

I’ll leave you with that metaphor.

— Rachel Pastan
Editor