BY BORYS KRAWCZENIUK, STAFF WRITER
As Paige Cognetti and her husband, Ryan, headed home Tuesday night after her election as Scranton mayor, their Uber driver mentioned his street needed to be paved.
“Ryan said to me, ‘Well, maybe you should just get a paver and start going out yourself. I’ll go with you; we’ll just do some paving on our own,’” the mayor-elect said, laughing.
Welcome to the mayor’s job, which former Mayor Jim Connors calls a “24-7” deal.
Connors occupied the mayor’s office in January 1992, when the state officially declared Scranton financially distressed, and Cognetti, the city’s first female mayor, was 11 years old and growing up in her native Oregon.
On Jan. 6, just days before the 28th anniversary of distressed status, fixing the city’s financial and other troubles will fall to Cognetti, now 39.
She also will have to push the city past the worst corruption scandal in its history and meet the rising expectations of citizens used to setting their sights low.
“Having had lots of attention in the last 24 hours, even from national media, people want Scranton and cities like Scranton to do well,” said Cognetti, who appeared on CNN on Wednesday and MSNBC on Friday. “I have a responsibility to carry that forward. It’s a little bit overwhelming in some ways, but with the right people in my personal and professional life, I can do it. But yeah, it’s a lot.”
Cognetti isn’t ready to announce her department heads and plans to announce her transition team soon. Before her inauguration, she hopes to have a written strategy for her first 100 days and beyond.
She wanted to rest this weekend, but planned to talk to potential transition team members. She will begin more intense preparations for her administration this week by meeting with incumbent Mayor Wayne Evans.
Evans has the job because city council appointed him to replace ex-Mayor Bill Courtright, whose resignation and guilty plea in July to federal corruption charges seriously scarred the city’s reputation. His resignation prompted the city’s first-ever special election for mayor.
Since then, The Sunday Times uncovered city Fire Chief Patrick DeSarno filling up his city-owned vehicle with a city-issued gas card while on vacation at the Jersey shore, and an overall lack of oversight and possible abuse of gas card use.
The city implemented a new ethics code in January. It includes a provision requiring city employees to file statements of financial interest, indicating the sources of their income and affiliations. Cognetti plans to review the code and Evans’ new gas card policy to see if they need bolstering.
She promised to enforce the final policies and educate city employees on the rules.
“The people who are going to be in place come December and January, we’re really going to be able to move forward with ethics reform, not just in the city, but also in the school district,” Cognetti said. “Voters chose that. I think they chose the people that they think will be able to have us turn that corner. … That stigma of corruption, we just have to beat (it) with hard work and moving forward.”
The city appears on track to leave state distressed status next year. Cognetti promises to have the right staff around her to ensure city finances remain stable and to deal with potentially costly losses of still-pending legal challenges to the city’s tax structure, trash disposal fee and sewer authority sale.
Regardless of what happens, she said, tax reform tops her priority list.
“It’s certainly not an easy fix,” Cognetti said. “And, it takes a long, long time, but it has to happen. If we don’t fix the tax structure, people will continue to keep leaving.” She said voters’ approval of a school district shift from business privilege and mercantile taxes to a payroll tax is “a good start.” The city is planning the same for the two business taxes considered a roadblock to attracting more retail and professional businesses.
As she campaigned, Cognetti repeatedly heard elderly voters say they are scared high property taxes will cost them their homes.
In the short term, she wants to address that by ensuring everyone eligible knows about the state’s property tax and rent rebate program and the tax-reducing homestead exemption. The long-term solution centers on three elements.
One is a countywide reassessment of land and buildings, which Cognetti said she believes will help more than hurt city residents whose homes have lower values than homes outside the city. She plans to push for reassessment.
The other elements will require reducing the city’s 2.4% wage tax (the school district charges another 1%) and growing the city’s tax base by attracting new businesses and homeowners.
Cognetti points to New York City, many times more populous, but with a maximum income tax only a bit higher than Scranton. New York’s income tax ranges from 2.907% to 3.876%.
“It’s unbelievable,” Cognetti said. “In New York City, at least you get a subway.”
She acknowledges the income tax helps pay for full-time police and fire departments, but says the tax must come down for Scranton to grow. Reducing the tax — a key but unrealized goal since Scranton’s first financial recovery plan in 1992 — will prove difficult.
She sees vacant land in the Keyser Valley as the potential home of future local economic anchors. Cognetti grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, home to the world headquarters of Nike whose growth allowed Beaverton’s tax base to rise steadily.
“I’m not saying we’ll be able to recruit a Nike to Scranton,” Cognetti said. “However, it really does matter to have just one big anchor. … I’m not going to make these big promises, but really deep down I know that if we can recruit a couple of big anchor companies, that can really help us shift and move on to some of these (other matters). That could give us more money for the streets.”
By the streets, she doesn’t just mean paving.
“Figuring out how do we fix the roads, how do we get street signs in our neighborhoods, how do we get lighting, how do we increase the physical safety of the different neighborhoods,” Cognetti said. “That’s a big piece.”
The city has begun addressing the lack of street signs. Cognetti wants to attract corporate and institutional sponsors to help the city pay for them.
Beyond finances and streets, Cognetti plans to regularly attend council meetings and increase city government contact with residents. She said many residents lack cars and can’t get to City Hall, where parking is at a premium anyway, so she plans “pop-up offices” to bring services to neighborhoods.
For her inauguration, Cognetti, who expects her first child next month, wants to host a children’s celebration in addition to the typical festivities.
“I want to be really close to our community and our kids,” she said. “I think we can do that with families and everyone by continuing to engage … whether they’re town halls, whether they’re meet-and-greet coffees, a mix of those types of things. When you’re actually governing, sometimes you can slip away from that community engagement.”
She has no illusions about the task ahead.
“It’s going to be really hard to actually do all this,” she said.
City council President Pat Rogan, who hasn’t talked much with Cognetti, and Councilman Bill Gaughan, who has, expect a good working relationship. Rogan said council worked well with Courtright and Evans.
Gaughan and Cognetti, a former school director, met when they served on a city-district shared services committee.
“The relationship between the new mayor and council will be fine as long as we’re all working on doing what’s best for the city,” Gaughan said.
Contact the writer:
bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com;
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