PBS 39 Money Pit Has Its Hand Out for $8,000 in Northampton County’s 2025 Budget

— Jeff Ward, Lehigh Valley News Briefs

Northampton County’s 2025 proposed budget is big — a half-billion dollars — but tight.

It keeps taxes at 10.8 mills, or $540 per $50,000 of assessed value. County Executive Lamont G. McClure prides himself on being a good steward of taxpayers’ money, or as blogger Bernie O’Hare puts it, McClure is cheap.

McClure has kept taxes level and cut them once during his two terms. It’s not popular in some quarters, but residents like it.

Look hard enough though and something stands out. PBS 39, aka Lehigh Valley Public Media, has its hand out for $8,000 in 2025.

This is the same south Bethlehem organization that sits on an $80 million endowment yet has an appetite for public money. Even when the grant amounts to 1/100th of 1% of its endowment. The $8,000 is the same amount it received from the City of Easton earlier this year.

This county money isn’t from property taxes, it’s from the county hotel tax. A fee is levied on hotel stays, which in turn is then spent on activities that are supposed to create tourism.

How some of these organizations that get grants boost tourism is a mystery to me, but some certainly do. One thing for sure, not many of them are sitting on an $80 million pile of money.

And I doubt that any spent $15.15 million in fiscal 2023 while taking in $6.49 million, for an $8.66 million deficit. That is close a deficit of almost $1,000 per hour. $1,000 PER HOUR. Ponder that.

It’s time to stop giving PBS 39, by any name (listed as Lehigh Valley Public Telecommunications Corp. on page 186 of the proposed budget) any money until the organization shows it has a purpose and a future.