In a way, Jonathan Johnson has come home again.
A former Cleona Borough council member, Johnson was hired as the municipality’s latest borough manager and began his new job on July 1.
His time on borough council in the mid-1990s dovetails nicely with his 34-year professional career as a research analyst at the Center for Rural Pennsylvania. The center is a bipartisan, bicameral legislative agency that serves as a resource for rural policy within the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
“At the state level, you get one perspective, and at the local level you get a very different perspective,” said Johnson. “I thought that different perspective was very interesting and in my research with the state we did a lot of analysis of what’s going on at the local level.”
That analysis helped policymakers craft legislation to improve the quality of life for Pennsylvanians.
“We did surveys of municipal officials trying to find out issues that are affecting people,” said Johnson. “One person said in our office that at the state (level) we don’t really do anything, we just give out money. What really happens is at the local level. I think on the local level, you are really doing things. I find that intriguing and I really enjoy that.”
Johnson said he did two stints as a Cleona Borough Council member.
He served one four-year term and lost his bid for reelection. However, he came back to fill out the term when a seat became vacant on the seven-member council. He then won a new term in the early 2000s but resigned shortly thereafter after deciding to move from Cleona to Annville.
“When you’re living outside the borough, you can’t be on council. But in Annville, I was an alternate for the zoning board and then I became a member of the Annville Economic Development Authority,” said Johnson. “We were the authority responsible for all the downtown improvements, the fountain, part of the streetscape, and those buildings that were rehabbed and the parking lot to the rear (of the fountain).”
Johnson vividly remembers when that work happened because it was interrupted by a crisis, the Great Recession that occurred in 2008 with the collapse of the mortgage industry that rocked the housing market and the nation’s economy.
“I can remember, it was ’07, ’cause everybody wanted to give us money and everybody wanted to talk to us, but by ’08, after the collapse, no one wanted to talk to us,” said Johnson. “So we had a hard time finishing that project, but I think it was pretty successful.”
That’s the kind of project that enhances a community, is a lifetime achievement for those who made it happen and it gets noticed by visitors for its aesthetic value.
“It was expensive, there’s no two ways around that one,” said Johnson. “I was at a meeting in Schuylkill County and people were commenting on that project. Knowing I was involved, I was like, ‘Wow, other people have noticed it.’”
Johnson said his work at the center and municipal service to both Cleona and Annville have prepared him for his new role in several ways.
“One was recognizing that the buck stops at the local level and that it’s the responsibility of local government to provide services,” he said. “Also, knowing that the boroughs and all local governments, townships, cities, they need to be responsive to their citizens. You just can’t say, ‘Go pound sand.’ You have to answer them. You have to address what their concerns are. You may not always give them the answer they want, but at least you can address what you need to be responsive to their needs.”
Working for an association that studied local governments statewide gave Johnson a broad world view of how local municipalities function.
“It gave me a good sense of what other communities are doing around the state,” said Johnson. “One of the fortunate things of my job was I got to do a lot of traveling and you got to see everything in the state from a rural perspective. You got to go to a lot of small towns and some of them were doing fabulous jobs, some not so good, some in-between.”
Those travels were educational experiences for Johnson.
“It gives you a sense of what works and doesn’t work in the community, and also points to the need for leadership at the local level,” he said. “That message was driven home over and over again that local leadership is critically important.”
Gathering data analytics for the center proved to be a useful tool that Johnson will utilize as borough manager.
From the data perspective, analytic perspective, we got to do a lot of data analysis, we got to do a lot of budgeting, we got to do a lot of analysis of how money comes in, money goes out, how municipalities finance themselves, and where some of the shortcomings were, some of their needs. We got to see that quite a lot in the background,” said Johnson. “When I was on council, part of my responsibilities then was to make the budget every year and figure out how we’re gonna get the money to do different things.”
Johnson noted that while communities change over time, the principles of running a municipal government remain constant.
“It’s a very different borough now than it was back then, but the basics are still the same,” he said. “You have taxes, you have other sources of revenue, you have expenditures, you have a police department, so how to balance those all out. There is no solution, either. Every year it’s a struggle and every year you need to address it. You can’t come into a new job or a new situation, guns blazing, thinking you have the answers.”
Johnson said he’s comfortable with having been a municipal leader who now must answer to current council members.
“They’re the bosses and if they say, ‘Jump,’ my answer is, ‘How high?’ But no, they’re the bosses.”
The biggest pivot from council member to borough manager is a dynamic that’s out of Johnson’s control.
“When I was on borough council, having a screen like that would have made us go ‘huh?’ That is hi-fi. Having a recorder like that, that would’ve been hi-fi, high tech stuff, back then,” said Johnson, pointing out the large TV screen on the wall of council chambers. “So, yeah, it was a very different era but things move forward. Things are very different now. The basics are still the same. The rules are still the same. How we do it, that’s very different.”
A native of Slippery Rock and a graduate of Penn State University, Johnson has lived most of his adult life in Lebanon County. LebTown asked him what he saw as Cleona’s biggest strength and weakness as a borough that’s one square mile and has about 2,100 residents.
“The strength is clearly its people. Cleona is a small community. The residents are very concerned with one another. They look after you, they wave to you, they talk to you,” he said. “Having the luxury of traveling around the state, I know people would kill for this. This is why people move here. They want to be in a community that has a sense of place, a sense of identity, a sense of, ‘I know my neighbors, my neighbors know me, it’s a great place for kids.’”
Although it’s a compact community, Johnson highlighted the borough’s park, central location and being financially sound as other attributes.
“We run a good shop here. Taxes are relatively low. And we provide good services to the residents.” said Johnson. “Can they be improved? Of course. Just Like the 4-H model, make the best better. This is something that we’ll always be working on, striving for, but we have a great council who gets that and they want to preserve and move Cleona forward.”
Johnson said in his opinion the borough’s biggest issue is not a weakness but what he called a barrier.
“A barrier to improvement, at least from my perspective, and it’s just my perspective only, and that’s traffic going up and down 422. There’s a lot of trucks, there’s a lot of cars,” he said. “It’s a main roadway, actually a federal highway. So there’s a lot of traffic. It’s not really conducive to being community-friendly. This does not suggest that we should move the highway because that’s not going to happen.”
Johnson noted that conversations with older residents revealed that there was talk of building a bypass in the 1960s.
“So, yeah, we’re not going to do that. But how to mitigate it, how to make it more pedestrian-friendly, how to make it easier for kids to get from the north side to the south side and vice versa. I think those are areas that need to be investigated,” said Johnson. “Also, we need to look at housing stock and make sure that everything’s up to code. That’s always an ongoing problem regardless of the municipality you’re in.”
Interestingly enough, Johnson’s first day on the job included a borough council meeting that evening.
“It was just a blur,” said Johnson of his first day of work. “We had to get this report ready, but fortunately, (borough clerk) Melody (Vanderveer) has been a superstar in helping me.”
Johnson said one vital component of his new job differs from the old.
“It’s the whole process of accountability. It’s very important, and I just never realized from afar how important it is, being able to track each and every dollar in and out and where it’s going,” he said. “The (financial) books have been a learning curve.”
Moving forward, Johnson sees his job as a balancing act between meeting current needs while keeping an eye on the borough’s future.
“Long term, I know I want to improve the quality of life in Cleona. I want to make sure that kids get back and forth from the north side to the south side as well as our elderly residents. I want to make sure the park remains sustainable. I want to make sure the borough finances remain sustainable,” said Johnson. “I mean, these sound very open-ended and they’re intentionally that way because there’s going to be opportunities and there’s going to be challenges, but the opportunities are there for council to kind of have them identify what they see Cleona looking like in the future.”
Having a conversation with council in the future about Cleona’s future is on Johnson’s radar.
“Once we have that on paper, then we can start planning to go there,” he added. “Money’s always going to be a problem, which is true with any organization. But opportunities come and we need to either take advantage of them or say, ‘No, that’s not good for Cleona.’”
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