Letters to the Editor | Feb. 23, 2023

Doylestown Health’s decision to sell Pine Run Retirement Community to the highest bidder violates the trust between the hospital and the community. The reputation of the hospital and the record of community service by the Village Improvement Association attracted the residents. Selling Pine Run and using the profits to help the hospital’s financial position exploits the trust placed in the hospital by residents who thought their future lives would be protected by a nonprofit community organization. The hospital will extract profits taken from the residents, whose purchases and ongoing monthly payments are the basis of the retirement community’s strong financial position. The buyer will likely increase the cost to residents and make cuts in staffing and services in order to maintain the facility and make a profit for shareholders. The hospital will win, and the new owners will win. Guess who will lose? Doylestown Health must find a different solution to its financial problems that does not violate the trust that the retirement residents placed in the hospital when they decided to move into Pine Run.

Bruce Katsiff, Philadelphia

Kudos to Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who had the foresight and intelligence to get special parking permits for school staff at Powel Elementary School in West Philadelphia. The teachers at Powel no longer have to leave their classrooms every few hours to put money in a parking meter. Shame on City Council for its refusal to implement such a policy citywide, thus making it difficult for the teachers to teach without interruption, and difficult for the School District to hire teachers when parking is such a problem. In a city where schools are failing our students, where reading and math levels are among the lowest in the country, where teachers leave their jobs in frustration, often after only one year, it would seem common sense to make it easy for teachers to park. When it comes to educating the future leaders of our city, it’s time to think outside the box.

Jean Haskell, Philadelphia

So, City Council wants to create a chief public safety director position for Philadelphia. Why kick the can down the street, yet again, when we already have many highly paid people responsible for “public safety,” including the mayor, everyone on City Council and their staff, the district attorney, the police chief, each police district commander, the school superintendent, etc. (And let us not forget the parents of each Philadelphia young person prone to violence, they should be part of the discussion, too.) Proponents want to spend another $265,000 plus benefits — plus the inevitable staff of public safety experts to decry that all of the above are working in “silos.” Well, why do we have a mayor for all of us, at-large City Council members for all of us, a district attorney for all of us, and a police chief for all of us, if not for them to be on top of every silo and to make coordinated sense of this issue — for all of us? Let us require that these respected leaders connect their silos, and save taxpayers the huge cost of hiring someone else to try to do the things that our city leaders should already be doing.

Gardner A. Cadwalader, Philadelphia

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