If you are unsure whether you have everything ready for your township's 2021 Organization Meeting, required to be held the first Monday of January, then make sure to attend this webinar. Holly Fishel of PSATS will review best practices and checklists to help ensure that your township has a smooth organization meeting.

In this webinar, Jason Wert with RETTEW will review the many benefits – financial, long-term resiliency, and sustainability – that grid-independent solar operations can bring municipalities and municipal authorities. He will use as a case study the University Area Joint Authority in State College, which incorporated a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) into its original solar array and has since achieved approximately 80% grid-based energy independence through this integrated system at its wastewater treatment and reuse facilities.

This webinar will help townships better navigate the Department of Labor & Industry’s new unemployment compensation filing website. It will also provide best practices for how townships should be using the website to more efficiently answer unemployment compensation claims made by former employers and better protect themselves against fraudulent claims.

This webinar is your opportunity to get answers to all of your Right-to-Know Law-related questions (or stump the presenters!). George Spiess with the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records and Scott Coburn with PSATS will be prepared to cover all sorts of issues, from pulling records from databases to drafting affidavits to when is an appropriate time to invoke a 30-day extension and much more. If you would like to submit questions beforehand to make sure that they get covered, please send them to scoburn@psats.org.

If you're not focused on volunteer recruitment and retention for your volunteer fire departments -- what are you focused on? This conversation will outline some of the forces converging on today's volunteers and will focus on offering solutions for the community and its first responders to move forward together towards adequate and affordable public safety services.

In this webinar, representatives from the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission will review key issues that are important to your township’s comprehensive planning and implementation efforts (using Susquehanna Township as an example), including infrastructure, land development, open space, housing/building stock, cultural resources, and transportation. They will also discuss how you can most effectively use the tools in the Planning Toolkit developed by TCRPC.

Occasionally a township board will be politically or philosophically divided to the point that it makes it very difficult to operate. In this webinar, we will discuss a variety of common “divided board” issues, including filling vacancies on the board of supervisors, what to do when a supervisor abstains from voting to avoid controversial issues, the role of the chair in bringing order to the meeting, and the rights of supervisors to address topics that are not on the agenda.

When Americans hear USDA, they usually think food and farming. However, the USDA is made up of 29 agencies and offices with nearly 100,000 employees, who serve at more than 4,5000 locations across the country and abroad. Through its rural development (RD) mission area, USDA not only supports ag producers, but also the communities where these farmers and their families live. In this webinar, you will learn about how your township can benefit from more than 50 loan and grant programs administered by USDA. Those grant programs help expand economic opportunities and create jobs in rural areas by supporting infrastructure improvements, business development, housing, community facilities such as schools, public safety, and health care, and high-speed internet access.

This webinar is designed to provide participants with an overview of the challenges and best practices associated with managing a township’s many stormwater-related responsibilities – in a way that is user friendly and easy to understand.

Many public employers do not understand their rights and liabilities under the Heart and Lung Act. As the result, improper benefits are provided and municipalities expend significant costs that may have been avoided. This webinar, presented by Scott Blissman and Ryan Cassidy of Eckert Seamans, will help you to identify who is and is not eligible to receive the generous benefits provided under the Act, what they receive, when benefits can be terminated and how. Learn to avoid the common mistakes made by employers which result in significant liability.