About Us
About Us
Pottstown Citizens for Enlightened Leadership was established to:
Provide information and analysis to help inform readers about local issues.
Advocate for traditional neighborhoods which house people of all ages, races and incomes, with walkable neighborhood schools and tree-lined streets -- safe and attractive for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists.
Encourage Pottstown Borough and the Pottstown School District to conduct their business in an open and professional manner.
Make the best and most efficient use of community assets.
We do this through our Web site and through biweekly columns published in The Mercury as paid advertisements.
Note: Pottstown Citizens for Enlightened Government was created as a community service in 2007. It is financed entirely by Tom Hylton. In the interests of transparency, we file annual financial reports with the Montgomery County. See the "About Us" drop down tab, above.
Tom Hylton, treasurer and Web site editor, has lived with his wife, Frances, in an 1870 brick house at 222 Chestnut Street in downtown Pottstown, next to the Potts Family Burial Ground, for 50 years. They also own the neighboring apartment house at 220 Chestnut Street, where Tom's mom lived the last few years of her life.
Frances retired in 2008 after 35 years as an elementary school teacher in the Pottstown School District. During his first 22 years in Pottstown, Hylton wrote for The Mercury. In 1983 he conceived and organized Trees Inc., a non-profit which raised $500,000 to plant and maintain street trees in Pottstown. The following year he co-founded Preservation Pottstown, a non-profit dedicated to preserving Pottstown's architectural heritage. That organization has evolved into the Mosaic Community Land Trust.
In 1990, he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. He resigned from the newspaper in 1994 to form a small non-profit and write a book about ways Pennsylvania can preserve its towns and countryside. Later he produced and hosted a public television documentary based on the book that has aired more than 100 times on PBS stations nationwide.
Hylton is currently in his thirteenth year on the Pottstown School Board. He is in his sixteenth year on the Pottstown Planning Commission, where he wrote Pottstown's zoning and subdivision ordinance pro bono in 2003.
This Web site was established in December 2008.