The Lancaster City Republican Committee is turning to a youth movement.
Tonight at Prince Street Cafe, I met with their first - and what appears to be only - City Council candidate, and it certainly wasn’t who I expected. I thought for sure I knew every potential GOP city candidate by name, face and reputation. I was wrong.
The GOP is putting 24-year-old Matthew Holden on its ticket, hoping the brown-eyed York County native who’s wife is a McCaskey science teacher can lead them back to city government. As it is, there’s not a single Republican in an elected city office. There’s hasn’t been one in three years.
Holden and his wife, Molly, live on North Reservoir Street. He works for Farmers Fire Insurance Co. in York as a claims manager, but as he put it, he and Molly live in Lancaster city because it’s simply “more fun” than York.
Chief issue for the Republican is how the city is drawing down on its Rainy Day Fund, a pool of money saved for potential emergencies. For the 2009 budget, the Gray administration scooped $1.1 million out of the pool to keep it balanced
“We’re drawing down our savings at a pretty rapid rate,” Holden said tonight. “Yes, the budget’s balanced, but if you continue to pull (money from the Rainy Day Fund) out, in a few years, you’re out of money. I mean, if you aren’t going to cut expenditures now, in five years when there’s nothing left in the Rainy Day Fund, you’ll have to do more than cut expenditures.”
Holden said he’s concerned that should that scenario occur - he meant aside from cutting services you will have to raise taxes - then economic development will be stunted. He said he and his wife love the arts community and what’s it done for Lancaster city, and he wants to protect it by keeping taxes low.
Holden has his work cut out for him. There’s roughly 14,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in the city, an astonishing gap when you think about a city of 50,000 people, and so he’s going to need crossover votes.
