A decade ago, Scranton completed two of its biggest “monetizations” of city assets in selling the sewer system and leasing the parking system.
At the time, the city was still deep in long-standing financial distress and still reeling from near bankruptcy in 2012.
The monetizations forged by former Mayor Bill Courtright and city council stand as two of the most consquential financial moves the city ever made and they still resonate today in the form of various lingering after-effects and unfinished business.
The agencies involved — the Scranton Sewer Authority and the Scranton Parking Authority — still exist, though for different reasons, but both continue to work toward finally dissolving and ceasing to exist, possibly in 2027.
Scranton Parking Authority
The parking authority owned the city’s parking garages and the city owned the parking meters, and the parking authority had managed the meters and garages as one system.
The monetization of the parking system of garages and metered street parking spaces got completed first, in summer 2016. Leasing the parking system to an outside entity, which is now named Grow America, allowed the city to clean up the fiscal mess created by the parking default of 2012, but it came at the cost of bringing in the outside operator for over four decades. This deal involved a long-term lease of the parking assets for 45 years — it was not an outright sale — and the parking authority was going to continue to exist.
The leased system initially worked well but the COVID-19 pandemic would change the equation. A downturn led to the city in July 2025 helping the outside operators restructure their debt and avoid a default that would have harmed the city’s financial stability and creditworthiness.
A key plank of refinancing included an expansion of weekday street parking hours from 5 to 7 p.m., for two extra hours of having to pay for street parking at payment kiosks. The 8 a.m. start time to pay for street parking remained the same. Parking-rate increases previously approved several years earlier also took effect in 2026. Street-metered rates paid at kiosks increased from $2 per hour to $2.25; the parking garage rate rose from $1 per hour for up to 10 hours to $1.25 per hour.
By allowing the refinancing, bondholders took “a $15 million haircut,” meaning a reduction by $15 million in the amount of the returns they initially expected to receive over the life of the bonds over 45 years, or from 2016 to 2061. The refinancing also extended the term of the management arrangement between the city and Grow America another nine years, to 2070.
Since the restructuring, parking system finances have improved and trended in the black. The restructuring also spelled the eventual end for the authority. That ‘s because ownership of the SPA’s four parking garages — Connell, Casey, Linden (SPA) and Medallion — transferred from the SPA to the city, essentially rendering the authority as unnecessary.
At a SPA meeting on Sept. 22, authority Executive Director/Solicitor Todd Johns said the authority must remain in existence until two pending lawsuits, which name SPA as a defendant and involve incidents that occurred prior to the restructuring, are resolved. An outside counsel was looking to get SPA removed as defendant in one case, and a settlement was potentially in the works in the other lawsuit, he said.
The parking authority set a meeting schedule for 2027, for meetings to be held Feb. 17, July 21 and Oct. 20, all at 6 p.m. at Scranton City Hall.
Scranton Sewer Authority
The skeleton Scranton Sewer Authority is still working on securing a few dozen outstanding sewer-line easements and assignments.
This authority had not dissolved after the $195 million sewer sale to Pennsylvania American Water closed in December 2016 and remained in existence to obtain hundreds of easements that inexplicably were never previously acquired over many prior decades.
Sewer-line easements are necessary for quick, emergency access to a property, if ever needed. In developing the sewer sale over a decade ago, the SSA discovered that about 600 easements were somehow never obtained. That led to a class-action lawsuit against the authority in November 2016 over compensation to property owners for providing easements. In December 2020, SSA reached a $7 million settlement with most of the 600 property owners.
In January 2024, the board hired the Durkin MacDonald law firm of Dunmore to resolve the last batch of missing sewer-line easements, at that time believed to potentially have been about 80, that the authority needed to secure before it could dissolve and cease to exist. In April 2024, attorney Larry Durkin of Durkin MacDonald became the SSA solicitor.
Durkin and his firm have continued to winnow the list of easements, as well as outstanding assignments of easements that also must be obtained and recorded. An assignment is a legal transfer of an easement from one party, such as a property owner, to another entity, such as the sewer system.
That work continues and there are about two dozen left to acquire, but those likely won’t get resolved before the sewer sale’s 10-year anniversary, Durkin said at an Oct. 7 meeting of the SSA. The board that night approved batches of several settlements of “declarations of takings” of outstanding easements and several resolutions to proceed with acquisitions or condemnations of easements.
“We’ve made a lot of progress,” but the dissolving of the sewer authority probably won’t happen by the end of this year, Durkin said.
MONDAY UPDATE
THEN: Scranton monetized its sewer and parking systems a decade ago, in separate transactions completed in 2016.
NOW: The Scranton Parking Authority and Scranton Sewer Authority remain in existence and are still working toward finally dissolving.
The Linden Garage in downtown Scranton Thursday, June 26, 2025. (SEAN MCKEAG / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)