Apr 25, 2015 2 min read

I own my home in the McGuffey School District, in Blaine Township. It is where county commissioners Diana Irey-Vaughan, John Bevec and Bracken Burns did the land swap deal a few years back. They unanimously voted to take approximately 4,200 acres of developable land permanently off of the McGuffey School District’s tax rolls.

The county agreed to swap that land with the Pennsylvania Game Commission for about 1,275 acres of land the game commission owned up around the northern end of the county. Then the county turned those 1,275 acres over to a nonprofit agency to develop.

All those once-pristine acres that Burns raved about are now peppered with gas wells, holding ponds, compressor stations, and pipelines. It is the Pennsylvania Game Commission now profiting from the royalty checks and lease agreements, not Washington County.

Need we wonder why McGuffey requested a countywide property reassessment?

I do not think the county commissioners who approved the land swap, and all the ones that have followed, have been doing their jobs when it comes to my end of the county.

Why didn’t they work on developing an industrial park off of Interstate 70, which runs through the McGuffey School District with three exits? Now I have to listen to Commissioner Larry Maggi say the commissioners never agreed to the reassessment, when they initially signed an affidavit to voluntarily agree to reassess in the first place. I blame them for the problems with the shrinking tax base in the McGuffey School District.

I can look out my front and back door windows to see that a reassessment won’t help much in my school district when someone gave away a sizable chunk of our tax base. All I see for miles is land owned by the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

I certainly won’t be cheering on the county commissioners for going forth with the reassessment.

Mary Cummins

Avella