White Township, Pennsylvania

8 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 10 WHI TE TOWNSHI P , PENNSYLVANI A close to that urban center. So, essentially, the community without zoning has sort of zoned itself. The commercial likes to be close to the commercial. Close to the people. Close to the university.” One of the most attractive features of White Township is that there is no real estate tax. The supervisors, over history, have chosen to operate under an earned income tax, which is a half percent. They’ve operated on a balanced budget for years, getting creative when they can, like playing landlord to a Verizon cell tower on one of their recreation properties. That lease brings in a monthly rental fee, just shy of $1,000. “One of our main focuses is the extensive and modern infrastructure we have in place,” Anderson maintains. We have 100 miles of township roadway, we have 85 miles of township sanitary sewer line, and we have about 2,500 sanitary sewer manholes that go with that sanitary sewer line. We also have 100 miles of storm water piping, which is huge, due to our proactive approach and flood mitigation and flood prevention.” Infrastructure keeps the foundation strong. But things like walkability and bikeability are attractive features that keep the community aspect strong. “More recently, we’ve started a complete streets policy,” Anderson explains. “This basically says when we do street improvements or any road improvements, we’re going to make sure that we can do as much as we can for traffic calming and accommodating all modes of transportation, including bicycles and pedestrians, and making them ADA accessible if need be. We’ve worked with the county and IUP to develop a multimodal plan, which is actually a spinoff of the IUP community district plan. So we’ve been very active in transportation from a planning