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• Emily Previti/PA Post
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  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

 Ed Mahon / PA Post

Four Republican candidates for York County commissioner participated in a debate on April 29, 2019. They are, from left to right, Steve Chronister, Chris Reilly, Ron Smith and Julie Wheeler.

From The Context, PA Post’s weekday email newsletter:

Election section

Ed Mahon / PA Post

Four Republican candidates for York County commissioner participated in a debate on April 29, 2019. They are, from left to right, Steve Chronister, Chris Reilly, Ron Smith and Julie Wheeler.

• Republican State Rep. Fred Keller won a special election in the sprawling 12th congressional district in northeastern Pennsylvania. It was an anticipated result, but PA Post’s Ed Mahon puts it in perspective with this analysis on the heels of the President’s stop there on Monday.

• Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney won the Democratic primary Tuesday; in Allentown, it was acting Mayor Ray O’Connell. O’Connell, appointed to fill the role temporarily after now-imprisoned ex-mayor Ed Pawlowski resigned, sailed to victory “despite pushing through a 27% tax hike in December,” the Allentown Morning Call reports.

• Over protest from the York County GOP, ex-commissioner Steve Chronister launched a comeback campaign within a year of garnering national attention for calling the cops on a group of black female golfers at his family’s course. He said they were playing too slowly. Late Tuesday night, Chronister trailed three candidates by wide margins. The top two vote-getters would advance.

Best of the rest

Municipalities would pay an average of 9 percent of their annual budgets under a formula proposed by Gov. Wolf and, more recently, legislation.

• One bill has been introduced in the state House that would enact a per capita fee for full-time state police service, and a Senate companion bill is forthcoming. I made a map showing the relative cost for each affected municipality and talked to some community leaders in places that would be charged the most under the proposal. It’s all here.

• A federal agency focused on pipeline safety is warning operators about the dangers of building in erosion-prone areas, and outlined related precautions. It cited several incidents in recent years, including a massive gas spill into a creek in Lycoming County, as impetus for the advisory. Susan Phillips has more details in this StateImpact Pennsylvania story.

• State corrections officials are going abroad this summer to learn about prison practices in Norway and Sweden. They’ll test out what they learn on inmates in Chester County, WESA’s An-Li Herring reports in this story about the excursion.