What Chester’s next mayor has planned as the city marks 1st year since filing for bankruptcy
"There is no get-rich-quick scheme," said Mayor-elect Stefan Roots. The city will try an tax-abatement program.
As the City of Chester on Friday marks the first anniversary of its entry into a rare and often tempestuous municipal bankruptcy that likely will continue at least two more years, Mayor-elect Stefan Roots says the state-appointed receiver is looking for “every dollar.”
Yet as desperately as the city could use a Mega Millions lottery jackpot, Roots, the first-term Council member who this week was elected mayor of Pennsylvania’s oldest town, said the road out of bankruptcy may well begin with forgoing some tax revenue.
A la Philadelphia, the Chester City Council has approved a “pilot program” to offer a 10-year tax abatement to developers and property owners, part of an effort to upgrade the badly aging housing stock in a town whose economy is still reeling from the exodus of riverfront factories along the Delaware decades ago.
“There’s no get-rich-quick scheme,” he said. “We need something bright, new and shiny for Chester, and it doesn’t have to be industry on the waterfront.” Roots has strongly opposed siting a liquefied natural gas plant in the city.
After defeating Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland in the May Democratic primary, Roots, 62, was elected Tuesday by a 4-1 ratio over independent candidate Anita J. Littleton. Like Philadelphia, Chester is overwhelmingly Democratic; no Republican ran for mayor.
Voters also elected two new members to the five-member Council — which includes the mayor — in an overhaul of a city government that had an acrimonious relationship with the receiver, Michael Doweary, who had filed for bankruptcy on the city’s behalf.
The receiver’s office is “looking forward” to working with Roots and the newly elected Council members, Tameka Gibson and Fred Green, “to face Chester’s very real challenges,” said Vijay Kapoor, Doweary’s chief of staff.
Kirkland had accused the receiver’s office of “meddling” in city politics. When Doweary warned before the primary that the city’s fiscal condition was so dire that the 300-year-old town could face “disincorporation” — ceasing to become a municipality — Kirkland dismissed it as a ploy to aid Roots’ campaign.
In a Council speech after his defeat, Kirkland said: “The receiver and his team were here to help us with our finances, not get involved in a primary.” He said the sum total of the receiver’s efforts amounted to “garbage. And, unfortunately, some folks ate it.”
Doweary filed for bankruptcy three weeks after he learned that Council member Will Morgan, who was in charge of paying the city’s bills, had lost $400,000 in a phishing scam months earlier. Morgan was defeated in the May primary.
Chester became only the 31st municipality to enter bankruptcy since Congress offered the option in the 1930s.
The receiver’s office said in April that an audit of Chester’s 2019 budget showed a five-year $27.7 million deficit, not including $39.8 million in missed annual pension payments. The total annual budget is about $60 million. The city is “on pace to face an insurmountable deficit in 2025,” the receiver said, although audits for 2020, 2021, and 2022 had not been completed.
Getting those finished will be a priority, said Roots. “There’s going to be a lot of opening drawers, filing cabinets, turning tables upside down, just to find documents and money,” he said. “It’s going to be helter-skelter, and we’re going to get it done.”
He said one thing the city has going for it is the dramatic drop in violent crime in the last three years after the Kirkland administration and the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office formed a partnership. Homicides dropped from 32 in 2020 to 11 in 2022, and overall shootings from 119 in 2020 to 53 last year.
“As much as that’s an old stigma to shake,” Roots said, “the numbers don’t lie.” The city’s population, about 33,500, grew 2.5% from April 2020 to July 2022, according to the U.S. Census. However, the median household income was under $36,000, about half the statewide average, with 28.5% of Chester households living in poverty.
Only about a third of residents live in owner-occupied housing, something Roots would like to see change.
He is hoping that the abatements will encourage new home building and rehab projects and jump-start others that are on the books. If the program doesn’t appear to be working after three years, it will be scrapped, he said.
“We can’t give away the store right now when we’re in bankruptcy,” he said. “The receiver is trying to find every dollar he can.”