Borough council not telling it like it is

Every November, Mt. Gretna Borough officials comply with state laws that require that independent public bodies publish the upcoming year's budget for the taxpaying public to review and comment on. Independent government bodies have to publish, each their own, a budget. Here, the Authority and the Borough are independent public bodies. Easy enough. They produce separate budgets for us to review in November.

Now, its fairly obvious that the intent behind that law is to provide the public with a mechanism to follow the fiscal operations of its public body.

So, when the Borough publishes a November budget for us that indicates a total budget of $150,000, you have to ask yourself who is trying to pull the wool over whose eyes when the Borough then reports a budget of around $589,000 to the state.

There is alot of fancy shifting and "relabeling" of monies here. And, don't be fooled. What was once promoted to the public thirty or twenty years ago as an "efficiency-based relationship" is certainly no longer an efficiency for us.

Times brought changes, yet the multiple ways in which this thirty year-old public administration has devised to reach into all our wallet's pockets have not matured and evolved with the times, nor with the community. Which is why this BOROUGH sees fit to reach freely into OUR water fees, sewer assessments, Chautauqua maintenance assessments, and Borough taxes to appropriate the hundreds of thousands of dollars each year that it takes to keep their long-time friends properly equipped and working fulltime--ALBEIT PROVIDING SERVICES TO PRIVATE ENTITIES OUTSIDE THE BOROUGH. And when it comes time for the borough staff to respond to one of our needs, we are also paying their overtime when they have spent the bulk of their time doing work that benefits someone else.

Now, if Care or Bell were worried about making a living while working part-time for a very small public entity, they absolutely could have taken a second job, or built their own business. Care could have gone and hung his own shingle testing water for other water supplies and plowing. But he would have to tell us that he is doing for others stuff similar to what he does for us, the public. AND, more importantly, he would have to buy, use, and maintain his own equipment. In no uncertain terms is he allowed to use borough, or authority, stuff (including people) to add to his income by doing some type of work for non-borough constituents. It doesn't matter if Kilgore, Chucky, Council or God expressed their approval of Care using public resources to bolster his income and state pension--it simply is not allowed under PA law. It also doesn't matter that its been allowed for decades--its simply not allowed under the law. So, TOTO, you can see why Chucky wants to shoot the messenger.

These "labor and cost sharing realtionships" that Chucky has lead us into are not what the state means when it encourages municipalities to create "efficiency-driven" relationships. Our borough, or Authority, for that matter, can only use its public staff and resources to provide services for us. And, when a neighboring municipality--not a private entity, a MUNICIPALITY, needs something that we can share with it, we can create these "cost-sharing" and "labor sharing" relationships, AS LONG AS WE DERIVE SOME BENEFIT FROM THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE OTHER MUNICIPALITY. Simply put again, the borough can't enter into a relationship to provide services to a private entity. Period. And, the Borough can't enter into a relationship with a municipality if the taxpayers in the municipality that it serves receive no benefit from the relationship.

In other words, they can't pimp out our public staff and resources just to make sure that their friends have full-time work, plenty of overtime, and expensive equipment to use. But that's exactly what Chuck has created here.

Thirty years ago, you may have had to worry about the quality of work delivered by the public servants that provided your services. Today, however, you have to ask yourself how appropriate it is for our public leaders to suggest or threaten us with slow response times, with poorly plowed roads, or with icky-tasting drinking water if we don't pay their friends for 160, 200, or 240 hours of work per week for what really takes only one or two people to perform in a regular work week, or if we don't fork over the money for equipment and vehicles that a municipality with only 3.2 miles of paved roads has no business purchasing and maintaining.

We really have to ask ourselves if these actions are so appropriate, then why aren't they admitting the Borough's true expenses to us in November? and why aren't they calling out these "relationships" exactly for what they are when reporting to the IRS or to the State?

A taxpayer can profess his love for his friend, but it doesn't change his friend's errant or unethical behavior. Still, I thank Chucky for publically acknowledging that he is reading my posts and that they affect him so much. Maybe he will grow from the experience. maybe not. let's pray for growth.

Again, times have changed, my friend. The 70's are way long gone.