Lancaster County holds the line on taxes while neighbors impose double-digit hikes

In 2024, Delaware County shocked its residents when it passed a 24% tax increase. A few miles to the west, Chester County commissioners levied a 13% tax increase on its citizens. 

Just one year prior, Montgomery County enacted its own 13% increase.

Call it inflation’s second wave: Just as families were adjusting to higher prices for groceries and utilities, smaller governments began imposing their own increases — double-digit property tax hikes justified by saying inflation was forcing them to carry additional costs.

Standing apart from this turbulence, however, is Lancaster County, whose last tax increase stretches back to the Barack Obama administration — a decision in 2012 to raise taxes for calendar year 2013.

The absence of activity rarely makes news headlines, but for Lancaster’s Republican commissioners, they feel the absence of any tax increase is its own kind of news, especially given that the county’s restraint managed to navigate the tumult of the pandemic.

“I think genuinely, people generally are appreciative of the effort to do what we can to keep taxes low… I think there’s trust in the fact that we’re very, very careful with their tax dollars,” Commissioner Josh Parsons (R) said in a recent interview.

The largest battle in that streak of years without a tax increase comes down to the county’s continued decision not to create a county-led health department. Counties have the option to create their own health department, but if not, the state health department remains the default governing authority.

While the creation of a county-led health department has been the topic of numerous debates and op-eds in the county, Commissioners Parsons and Ray D’Agostino (R) say they feel vindicated after the release of a 2024 report that showed the county had one of the lowest Covid-19 hospitalization rates in the commonwealth. That report, authored by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council in partnership with the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, looked at hospitalizations across Pennsylvania’s 67 counties from March 2020 to December 2022.

In that specific category, Lancaster vastly outperformed its neighboring counties like Lebanon, Berks, and York. The numbers were slightly more comparable for Dauphin and Chester counties, but Lancaster still outperformed them.

Michael Ripchinski, a physician at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health and a leader of Lancaster County’s pandemic response “cited the early establishment of regional testing sites, as well as the county’s contact tracing program established in coordination with the Pennsylvania Department of Health,” according to an article from Lancaster Online/LNP.

The same article also noted that the county had a high rate of Covid-19 infections.

“I think the facts back us up in not starting that now,” Parsons said. “In retrospect, our health outcomes are just as good or better than other counties that have them. The state has one that’s supposed to be providing the services to counties that don’t have one. And the cost [for having a separate one] is tremendous.”

Only six counties in the commonwealth have their own health department, currently.

A 2022 study of health outcomes by county shows three were ranked in the top ten. Allegheny, ranking sixteenth, and Philadelphia, ranking last at 67th, were the other two. (Delaware County should not be counted as having a health department in the 2022 rankings because its department didn’t begin until 2023.)

Lancaster County ranked number nine in that survey, and has consistently ranked in the top ten of Pennsylvania counties for health outcomes in recent years. For example, a 2018 report from Penn Medicine ranked the county eighth overall. Both rankings would put the county in the top 15% of counties with highest overall health outcomes for its citizens.

For a small point of comparison, the Delaware County health department had a budget of $19.7 million in 2024, which then decreased to $18.3 million in 2025. Not all of the costs of a county-run health department are borne entirely by the citizens, as a county-run health department can acquire grants from differing sources.

Parsons and D’Agostino said a county having its own health department comes with its own pitfalls as well. They both pointed to the $13 million debacle in which Chester County purchased Covid antibody testing kits, then hastily shelved them when the kits began producing inaccurate results.

In the years since the pandemic, Republican voter registration has held steady at 51% from 2021 to present, according to statistics from the Pennsylvania Department of State. In the same time, Democrats’ share of voter registration has been slightly trimmed from 33% to 31%.

Countering the Republican ethos for those Democrats in the county is Commissioner Alice Yoder, a career nurse.

“I do think in reality we reach a point where holding the line on taxes year after year starts to strain our ability to provide essential services effectively… I think a zero increase in budget may look financially responsible on paper, but when it doesn’t keep up with inflation or growing needs, it can end up costing us more down the road.”

While acknowledging the county does well in many health measures, she’s supportive of the creation of a health department.

In a forthright interview, Yoder repeatedly referenced good data collection as a key that drives much of her support of a health department, “engaging the community and folks that live in that community and people with lived experience to really think about how can we get the solutions we feel are going to work here in Lancaster. And I feel that’s the difference and that would be the importance of having a local health department.”

Apart from the single issue of the health department, Yoder said she’s concerned that the county has room to improve especially on issues of homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse.

Parsons and D’Agostino also point to the county’s philosophy of keeping monies from federal Covid spending grants restricted to one-time-only projects. Doing so kept the county from using grant money to create recurring annual costs that would need to be funded by taxpayers once the grant money was exhausted.

That idea surfaced in Delaware County in 2024, about six months before that county would enact its 24% tax increase. During a discussion about possible raises for health department employees and others, Democrat Councilwoman Christine Reuther snapped at the department director.

“But the problem is [the other employees are] not grant funded and we’re looking at a sizable tax increase just to keep things where they are for next year. So I mean, that’s the reality. I’m hoping it’s not going to be as sizable as some people think it will be, but there is going to be a…,” and Reuther then cut herself off.

Additionally, Broad + Liberty obtained a memo authored by an unnamed employee in Delaware County government that summarized a “county leadership” meeting with the executive director.

“Our county has been in the habit of using one-time funds for ongoing operating costs,” the employee wrote in the four-page memo outlining the meeting. 

D’Agostino said that’s exactly what Lancaster County was trying to avoid.

“Our guidelines specifically say this: that we are not going to use these [federal Covid] funds — whether we have a process by which the community applies for some of the funds or we use it ourselves — it will not be used for ongoing program costs or increasing programs that will specifically create more ongoing higher costs. That’s in our guidelines and we put that out to the community as well,” D’Agostino said.

“We’ve gone twelve years, can we go forever? No. Just like any local municipality, especially when you see the ballooning costs that we’ve seen” Parsons added.

“The inflation, the costs that have gone up have hurt businesses, families, and governments,” D’Agostino chimed in. “And we’re not going backwards. Those costs are not going backwards… The costs have gone up and they’re going to stay that way. And so now we’re grappling with it.”

Todd Shepherd is Broad + Liberty’s chief investigative reporter. Send him tips at tshepherd@broadandliberty.com, or use his encrypted email at shepherdreports@protonmail.com. @shepherdreports