2012 was trouble.

There were glaring instances of murder and abuse here.

There was psychological trickle-down from yet another distant mass shooting.

The long struggle to stretch the dollar translated to a new wave of tax hikes and belt tightening.

The Humane League announced it would become a no-kill shelter, signaling cutbacks in coverage.

But other top 10 stories of 2012 reflected optimism and new beginnings.

 

SLIDE SHOW: The year in photos: Lancaster County in 2012

 

An incoming warden made a fresh start at the county's troubled prison.

Millersville University, though losing its president, Francine McNairy, through retirement, has strengthened ties to the downtown and raised $85 million through the Soar to Greatness capital campaign McNairy launched.

LancasterHistory.org built a new campus and emerged as the leading caretaker of county historic culture.

The unsung Thaddeus Stevens story got a big lift from Hollywood.

Meanwhile, as noted by happiness and demographic indexes, people keep moving here and creating families.

As Victor DeSantis, associate provost for civic engagement at Millersville University, told a reporter last summer, people see the county as offering a high quality of life.

ECONOMIC TURMOIL

The moribund global economy impacted the county in significant ways in 2012.

The area's still-struggling middle class was closely documented in a series of Lancaster Newspapers articles in September.

The stories showed that, thanks to long-stagnating wages, rising costs and dwindling employment opportunities, many in the community are continuing to suffer in this economy.

"You have to hit the reset button" to revive the middle class, East Lampeter Township steelworker Mike Ponzillo told a reporter.

One high-profile tussle in the public/private sphere was that between the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority and the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau, over about $900,000 in annual hotel room tax revenue.

In the end, the money was to be again directed to its original recipient, the bureau. But the authority faces another potential hurdle in March, when its bond-debt payments might rise.

UP WITH TAXES

County government and school district officials, saddled with rising expenses and drum-tight budgets, moved ahead with a series of tax hikes.

In many cases, they were the first hikes in years.

Every school district in the county, with the exception of Conestoga Valley, Elizabethtown and Octorara, approved sharper hikes this year than last.

Among municipalities approving real estate tax increases were Colerain, East Cocalico and Upper Leacock townships and Mount Joy, Manheim and Marietta boroughs and Lancaster city.

Meanwhile, Lancaster County Commissioners Dennis Stuckey and Craig Lehman announced a 2013 budget that boosts taxes by 9.3 percent.

Commissioner Chairman Scott Martin has said he won't vote for the proposal, scheduled for adoption Monday.

Stuckey called the hike "regrettable" but necessary this year.

NEW TO THE PRISON

The overcrowded old prison got a new warden, Dennis Molyneaux, in September.

Molyneaux, a 58-year-old former corrections officer who rose to be the No. 2 man at Montgomery County Correctional Facility, is charged with ushering in a new era for the county's struggling 19th-century lockup.

He takes the place of 31-year veteran warden Vincent Guarini, who retired in April.

While Guarini drew praise for his service and institutional knowledge, his administration had not been a smooth one in recent years.

In 2011, a citizens group, Have a Heart for Persons in the Criminal Justice System, called for Guarini's dismissal in light of a spate of suicides committed at the prison since 1998 and inmate lawsuits alleging "excessive force" by guards.

After an inmate smuggled in 39 packets of heroin, pills and two needles in January, Commissioner Craig Lehman called for the warden's ouster.

The prison's problems won't be easily fixed. In November, for example, another inmate attempted suicide. He was revived.

Earlier in the fall, the commissioners were forced to tap their fund balance to cover a million-dollar prison budget shortfall blamed on the expense of housing some inmates outside the county to ease crowding.

Still, Molyneaux, who was chosen after a national search, has already initiated changes, such as ending morning lockdowns in some areas of the prison and ramping up positive interaction between guards and inmates.

"A lot of the people have walked up to me at the prison and said, 'We're ready for a change,' " Molyneaux told a reporter in October.

"And I was happy to hear that. We're off to a pretty good start."

BRUTAL CRIMES

Several horrific crimes rocked the county in 2012, among them the beating of a 3-year-old Brecknock Township girl and the homicides of a mother and daughter in Leola.

Mona Jean Hess, 56, and her daughter, Makenzie Lauren Hess, 22, were found slain in their 224 Lemon Lane home June 15.

Prosecutors say 2008 Conestoga Valley High School graduate Gary Charles Gerlach strangled the daughter with a belt and used a hammer to bludgeon the mother.

Gerlach fled to a North Wildwood, N.J., beach hotel, where he was tracked by East Lampeter Township detectives two days after the crime.

No motive has been disclosed in the case, which is expected to go to trial early in 2013.

Prosecutors were planning to seek first-degree murder convictions and, if successful, the death penalty.

Gerlach, now 23, immediately confessed to the brutal slayings and remains in Lancaster County Prison.

He had been the boyfriend of Makenzie Hess and had lived with her and her mother for about two years.

Gerlach sexually assaulted the women after they died, according to court documents.

Dr. Jerome Gottlieb, a local psychiatrist, testified last month that Gerlach had been hearing voices and was incompetent to assist his trial defense. But Gottlieb told Lancaster County Judge Dennis Reinaker on Dec. 7 that Gerlach had "improved significantly" and was sane. Reinaker said trial proceedings should move ahead.

Some who knew the dead women said Gerlach's behavior had become erratic in the weeks before the killings, and that he had in at least one instance holed up several days in a northern Pennsylvania cabin while refusing to answer his cellphone.

Prosecutors say a young Columbia woman, Amber Faye Foultz, helped Gerlach flee the state in Mona Hess' stolen Acura and bought from Gerlach a flat-screen television and other items reputedly stolen from the Hess home.

Foultz was charged with hindering apprehension and related offenses.

In the child-abuse case, Joshua Tyler Martin, a 23-year-old foster father, is in Lancaster County Prison on $500,000 bail, charged with severely beating his 3-year-old foster daughter, Belle Roeting, on at least two occasions over a weekend in September.

The girl became unresponsive in her home at 377 Staver Road, Brecknock Township, on Sept. 23. She was treated at Hershey Medical Center for at least a month this fall. A hospital spokeswoman said Friday she had no information on the girl.

According to court documents, Martin told police the girl misbehaved and he then punched her with force with a closed fist and slammed her head into a wooden door frame.

Martin and his wife, Marla Martin, took in Belle along with her 1- and 2-year-old siblings earlier in 2012.

The siblings have been placed with a new foster family, officials said.

Marla Martin has not been charged with any crime.

On Oct. 5, more than 100 people attended a candlelight vigil for Belle on a hilltop at Samuel S. Lewis State Park in Wrightsville.

Joshua Martin waived an Oct. 22 preliminary hearing on felony charges of aggravated assault on a child and endangering a child.

According to an arrest affidavit, Martin beat Belle Sept. 21 and 23; he told police that the child had "annoyed" him.

GROWTH IN A HAPPY PLACE

Despite the sorrows and travails related above, Lancaster County is apparently a comparatively happy place.

That's according to a couple of prestigious national and international rankings reported here over the past year.

In the most recent accolade, conferred July 7 by CNN Go, the global lifestyle and travel website of Cable News Network, Lancaster Central Market was rated No. 8 among the world's top 10 fresh markets.

The only other U.S. market to make the list was Union Square farmers market in New York City.

Heading the list was La Boqueria in Barcelona, Spain. Central Market was sandwiched between the Kreta Ayer Wet Market in Singapore and the Marché Provencal, Antibes, France.

Market Master Jessica Mailhot said at the time that the listing surprised her but not the global classification.

International foodies traveling the East Coast visit Philadelphia and also gravitate to 23 N. Market St., Mailhot told a reporter.

"I think it's the combination of the Amish and the market" that attracts people, Mailhot said. "I hear French and Italian here on a regular basis."

It was also reported last July that the city placed first among midsize cities in the 2011 Gallup Healthways Well-being Index, while the county was ranked first among the 190 U.S. metropolitan areas that Gallup surveyed.

According to a July 1, 2011, census estimate, Lancaster city had 736 more residents than it did in April 2010, the greatest gain of any U.S. municipality.

Census data also showed that 59 of the county's 60 municipalities — all but Millersville — grew in population.

Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray attributed the city's popularity to its "noncar-dependent" lifestyle and appeal to many demographics.

Victor DeSantis, an MU provost, said the county's fertility and migration are responsible for its broad-based population increase.

THE McNAIRY FACTOR

Francine McNairy announced her retirement, effective Jan. 30, 2013, after nearly 10 years at the MU helm.

The leadership of the school's 13th president — and the first black woman to head a Pennsylvania state university — was widely hailed as visionary.

Michael G. Warfel, chairman of the MU Council of Trustees, said last January that the institution under McNairy has gone "from a very good state university to perhaps one of the best in the [state] system."

The school during her tenure attained record enrollment and embarked on high-visibility campus upgrades.

It also established a powerful new link to the community through acquisition of downtown performing arts space in the Ware Center, 42 N. Prince St.

Helping MU bolster its facilities and endowment during a time of painful state budget slashing has been McNairy's $85 million capital campaign.

Leaving "has not been an easy decision," McNairy said last winter, "but it's the right decision. The time is now right for new leadership."

John Anderson, a New York state college president, has been chosen as McNairy's successor.

NEWTOWN, OUR TOWN

The school shooting that left 20 students and six adults dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14 is not technically a local story.

And yet it is — because Lancaster County, site of the 2006 Nickel Mines Amish school shooting, has a notorious niche in the national litany of such tragedies.

And because, of course, the county has schoolchildren of its own, and the parents and families of schoolchildren.

One of the adult shooting victims, Lauren Gabrielle Rousseau, 30, a permanent substitute teacher at Sandy Hook, was the niece and godchild of Vicki Bomgardner Nagle, a Lancaster County resident and former Lancaster city district justice.

The slayings by Adam Lanza, who shot his way into Sandy Hook and later shot himself dead at the scene, subdued people's mood at Christmas and reignited the debate over gun laws.

Three days after the shooting, a record number of new concealed-weapons permits were purchased in the county. Officials speculated that people wanted to protect themselves — and that some people feared tougher laws might thwart them from obtaining firearms in the future.

In schools here and across the country, administrators reassured parents about safety procedures.

One week after the massacre, police scrambled to deal with a rash of rumors of gun violence by students.

Two teenage boys were arrested. A McCaskey student was charged with disorderly conduct for telling a Lampeter-Strasburg student that there had been a shooting at McCaskey.

A Peach Bottom boy who attends Solanco was charged with making terroristic threats for threatening to bring a gun to school.

According to police, the student said he wanted to "be like the shooter" in Connecticut.

MAKE WAY FOR HISTORY

LancasterHistory.org became the prime overseer of the county's historic culture in 2012.

The organization completed its renovated and expanded $8.6 million "Campus of History" at Marietta and President avenues in December and will open the facility to the public Feb. 1.

Formed in 2009 by merging the Lancaster County Historical Society with the Wheatland Foundation, LancasterHistory.org was caretaker for 15,000 historical artifacts.

That collection grew earlier this month with the addition of 2,750 items from the Heritage Center museum on Penn Square and the Quilt & Textile Museum on nearby Market Street.

The Heritage Center and quilt museum closed in 2011, owing to shrinking funding sources and declining attendance.

A $13.5 million campaign funded the LancasterHistory.org expansion.

Besides more than doubling the space of its previous quarters with the new 35,000-square-foot climate-controlled center, the organization will retain its downtown "historical outpost," said Chief Executive Officer Tom Ryan.

That storefront gallery, just off Penn Square at 4 W. King St., also will reopen Feb. 1.

The LancasterHistory.org inventory now includes famous Esprit collection quilts, handmade cradles, paintings, books, maps, case clocks, furniture and myriad other treasures.

Most of the three-dimensional items had been transferred to the suburban campus by last week.

"We're moving 300 years of history," Ryan said.

NO-KILL HUMANE LEAGUE

The Lancaster County Humane League acted on its long-considered mission goal to become a no-kill shelter, thrusting stray animal care in the county into a new light.

Where unwanted animals will be taken when the transition is completed in February is "of course, one of the prime questions that we will struggle with, and certainly the community will struggle with," Humane League president and CEO Joan Brown said in October.

The league once covered the entire county, which has 60 municipalities. In 2012, the number of contracts it had with municipalities here had shrunk to 11.

Nonprofit funding sources have dried up, according to Brown.

The league can no longer afford to accept unwanted or unclaimed animals for free. Nor will it involve itself as frequently in animal cruelty issues, said Brown, who noted that municipalities have started to fill the vacuum.

Dan Massey, chairman of the Humane League board, said, "We're not going to provide as many services as we did before."

STARRING STEVENS

White abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith, his biracial housekeeper and confidante, have long been local history luminaries.

But their names and, by association, Lancaster's, garnered national attention this year, thanks to filmmaker Steven Spielberg and scriptwriter Tony Kushner.

Their new vehicle, "Lincoln," stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens and zeroes in on a brief slice of Lincoln's presidency, the pitched 1864 political battle in the House of Representatives over passage of the 13th Amendment, ending slavery.

As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Stevens was pivotal in the struggle.

The Jones movie role, for which the actor received a Golden Globe nomination, is correspondingly meaty, showing the normally uncompromising human rights crusader compromising to get the monumental bill through.

The story, though centered in Washington, D.C., has special resonance for Lancaster, where Stevens, a Vermont native, moved in 1842 to practice law.

Smith, portrayed in the film by S. Epatha Merkerson, became his housekeeper in 1847 and then his manager and hostess, a remarkable partnership in a segregated era.

Their Queen Street properties were preserved years ago. But their life and times now have a larger context in the American mind.

Wrote Stephen B. Dietrich, president of the Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County, in a Nov. 25 Sunday News op-ed: "The movie 'Lincoln' shines a spotlight on Lancaster County through Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith. For this, we should be proud."

jrutter@lnpnews.com

blog comments powered by Disqus