Who pays?
For years, residents in municipalities with their own police departments have complained that they’re paying double, because they also have to pay for state police.
Meanwhile, the problem has been even worse for places like Uniontown, which is surrounded by municipalities with no local police. Without the expense of operating their own police department, those municipalities are able to keep their property taxes lower than Uniontown, which has its own police department. With lower taxes, those municipalities are able to attract more residents than towns with higher taxes such as Uniontown. It has led to a host of financial problems, which Uniontown and other similar municipalities are trying to deal with.
But now it turns out the problem is even more complex than anyone thought. The Associated Press reports that money from a recent increase in fuel taxes and motorist fees is going to shore up the Pennsylvania State Police instead of being used to fix roads and bridges as was intended.
“I think people are shocked to find that what they voted for is going to the Pennsylvania State Police,” Transportation Secretary Leslie Richards told the Associated Press.
The biggest reason for the increasing amounts of money going to the state police is that more municipalities are dropping their own police department in favor of free coverage from the state police.
According to the Associated Press, nearly $750 million out of the state police’s $1.2 billion budget comes from the highway fund. The state police would not divulge a cost figure for the free police service in response to requests from The Associated Press. However, the state police apparently told legislative researchers that it cost $540 million in 2012, more than half the agency’s budget that year. Of 2,561 municipalities in Pennsylvania, 1,287 have no police coverage other than the Pennsylvania State Police. Another 413 get free part-time coverage.
The issue has been a sore spot for at least two decades, since then-Gov. Tom Ridge, a Republican, sought to extract reimbursements from the largest free-riding municipalities.
Lawmakers, however, rebuffed him and have resisted every such effort since then. The state’s largest legislative district, in northern Pennsylvania, where dozens of municipalities are served by the state police, belongs to Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson. Of course, he’s opposed to any change in the status quo for his communities.
Richards agrees. She said instead of ridding towns of free local police service, the state should find new money sources.
Well, good luck with that, especially considering the budget gridlock in Harrisburg.
Some solution is needed. Some planners say that the state police budget could cost taxpayers another $400 million a year in the next decade. At that rate, PennDOT won’t have enough to fix potholes, never mind roads and bridges.
Something has to be done. In an ideal world, every municipality would have some type of basic protection, perhaps as part of a regional police force. State police would then be called in for major crimes such as homicides, aggravated assault and rapes.
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in training for the state police. That money shouldn’t be wasted on routine police calls. It should be used for crimes which require their unique skill sets.
Of course, that raises all sorts of other questions about local control and jurisdiction.
Municipalities won’t willingly agree to pay for their own local police. Some type of mandate will be needed. But how that comes about is anybody’s guess. The sooner we start dealing with this issue, though, the better off we’ll be. There will be no getting around it in the years to come.