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The Real Paul Thibault...
Friday, 18 April 2008
This was December, 2003, and Paul Thibault's last public appearance as a Lancaster County Commissioner, and he was among friends. Thibault warmly thanked his staff by name, of course, and then spoke the only known public words about his pre-Lancaster origins: "I wasn't born here, I wasn't raised here, I remember the day I arrived here. ...I got on the plane at Lester Pearson International Airport in Toronto - flew down to Lancaster airport - it was April of 1980." When he landed, Paul Thibault was a month away from turning 33 years of age.
Beginnings During his first year as county treasurer, Thibault was also a traveling salesman for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) firm. According to a lawsuit filed in Lancaster County, Thibault claimed an annual salary of $30,000 with a commission of $35,000 for every MRI site developed. This money was in addition to collecting a full-time salary from the county. The distinguishing part of his terms as treasurer - apart from the lucrative side income -- is that the county collected more taxes, by far, when he left office than when he was elected. This wasn't his fault, of course. It is the treasurer's job only to collect and keep track of, not levy, tax money coming to the county. But the fact is at the time Thibault took office, in 1987, the county collected $24.3 million in taxes; in 1995, when he left office, Lancaster County was collecting $44.6 million - an 84% increase. During the same time period, tax delinquency more than doubled! From his vantage as county treasurer, Thibault, more than any county official, knew of the increasing tax burden put on the Lancaster County taxpayer. All of that money came through Paul Thibault.
County Commissioner During that campaign, Thibault created and mass-mailed a four-page, glossy, full-color brochure that was supposed to answer all the questions about his past and who he really was. Instead, it raised more questions. The brochure reads like the opening of a biography of a major historical figure: "The Paul Thibault story begins in Hartford, Connecticut, where Paul was born in 1947. It was there that Paul, the fourth of six children, learned the values that would shape his life..." Unless Thibault "learned the values that would shape his life" in his first two years of life, this statement is untrue. Thibault and his family moved to Canada in 1949, when Paul was two years old, and Thibault lived in Canada until he got on that plane in 1980. The less-than-honest mailer wasn't raised as an issue during the campaign, and Paul Thibault won that election, and found himself a county commissioner. Paul Thibault's first term was defined by a decided closeness with the biggest companies in the county, particularly the companies of one S. Dale High, the largest builder/industrialist in the region. It was High's companies who found itself time and again, the beneficiary of tax breaks and subsidies from the county and state. Dale had a friend in Paul Thibault. At the end of his first term, Thibault introduced, and vote for, a bed tax that would subsidize a $30 million publicly owned convention center along side a privately owned $45 million hotel. The tax was imposed on all county hotel, motel and bed & breakfast establishments. Mom & Pop motels in Mountville, or Ephrata, or Strasburg, or Elizabethtown, anywhere in the county, now had to charge their customers a 3.9% tax on every rented room. This meant that hotel and motel owners throughout the county were literally paying for their direct competition because a High-owned hotel was intertwined with the financing of convention center project. During Thibault's time as commissioner, bonded debt increased from $54.1 to $152.9 million dollars. One of Paul Thibault's last acts as County Commissioner, conducted mere days before he strode confidently to that podium, was to introduce and get passed, a $40 million county-backed guarantee of convention center debt. This vote - taken just months before leaving office -- cost taxpayers $400,000 in immediate fees, and millions of dollars lost in interest. The purpose of the bond guarantee? To effectively bind future commissioners to support Penn Square Partners, one half of which was one S. Dale High.
The Next Step Armstrong went as far to personally twice rewrite state law to benefit the project and undermine legal challenges. This campaign, Paul Thibault has received an $11,000 campaign donation from S. Dale High. While this donation is considered large, the millions of dollars of public money that Thibault has funneled to High and his associates and aligned companies has yet to be counted. Current estimates are more than $50 million. In his senate campaign literature, Thibault touts his farmland preservation record, yet he missed an average of 42% of all farmland preservation meetings when he was commissioner. A number of meetings were canceled because the lack of a quorum. But he still puts that on his mass-mailers. So the answer to the question: "Who is the real Paul Thibault?" seems to depend on whether you listen to Thibault's words, or look at his deeds. |
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Little is known about Paul Thibault's almost 30 years in Canada (see sidebar), but much of his time in Lancaster is part of the public record.
This report will examine that record.