Hershey, chocolate and un-incorporated municipalities

Or, more succintly: Pennsylvania Municipality, 101

This missive will demonstrate the basis of power for a Borough and its responsibilities, which are two concepts that seem to have been usurped and exploited by the public officials which have had control of our public offices for the last thirty years and longer. Why do I suggest that? Well, because I am noticing that more recent residents of Mt. Gretna Borough and the longer-time residents seem to express differing knowledge and opinions regarding exactly what a public official's duties and powers are.

For example, the longer that you have lived here, the more likely you are to not realize--or, at least, not admit, that public officials have a responsibility to deliver certain public services, and, well, that you can "fire" them if they do not meet your expectations for that service. More importantly, you are likely to skip over the fact that this municipality is one of the absolute smallest, wealthiest, and least "needy" municipalities in the entire Commonwealth, making it extremely efficient and easy to deliver exceptionally fine services.

So, where the average municipality of our size is delivering services to its residents for about $150,000 a year, and providing those services over hundreds more acres than we have, dozens more miles of paved roads, and with a less wealthy tax base, there really is NO EXCUSE FOR EXTRACTING AN EXTRA $450,000 OUT OF US A YEAR to deliver the same fine services to the public. Unless, of course, you don't mind making sure your friends have a nice retirement package and you see that as a "public service" that the rest of your neighbors should help pay for.... That would also explain your reluctance to pass the "con"--the controls, and your caustic resistance to any one even inquiring into this scenario.

So, the next few posts will explain how a Borough gets created--and how an Authority gets created, and, more importantly, will describe the basis of their powers and their responsibilities to the public. Eventually, we will get to the discussion about what can happen when a public official steps outside of their "boundaries"--like ethical inquiries, auditor general inquiries, impeachment for cause actions, surcharge litigation, and, yes, even criminal charges.

To pique your curiosity for the next post, I will end this one by pointing out that Hershey--a municipality that we all know and love, is in fact really not a municipality as we know municipalities to be. It is a "census-designated place"--it was never "incorporated" and, therefore, its leaders can't tax its residents, and the nearby Derry Township is the government entity that provides residents with services. So, of course Derry Township can claim this "un-incorporated municipality" in its bundle of responsibilities.

This situation is not unlike the situation where you have a development or homeowners association whose incorporation documents assign that private entity with the responsibility to provide services to its resident shareholders and that community does not lie within the responsibilities of an incorporated municipality. In other words, it is just like the 87 acre-, 200 or so residential buildings-, and a few common structures-private entity called the PA Chautauqua that originated within an already populated, but un-incorporated municipality known over the last hundred years or so as Mt. Gretna. So, as legal entities or concepts,

Hershey, PA is to Derry Township as
PA Chautauqua is to Mt. Gretna Borough

...a private entity with residents that need services
and a
public entity providing public services to residents living outside their incorporated municipal responsibilities.
But, in this analogy, right off the bat you can see a fatal anomaly. Mt. Gretna Borough is an incorporated municipality comprised of no neighborhoods with residents, no developments, no apt. buidlings, no business districts, no homeowners associations except for ONE: a homeowners association including only about 200 homes. Take away the Chautauqua, and what then is Mt. Gretna Borough and why would it exist? So, why does it even exist today? It obviously does not create an efficiency, but a redundancy. If any of you know of any other municipality that has only one real constituent, please, let me know.

However, if you stick with the program and keep following these posts, you will see that even those legal concepts of incorporated municipality and homeowners association-private corporation are challenged severely by the "arrangements"--especially the financial arrangements and the use of public resources arrangements, that have been allowed to develop between the private entity here called the Chautauqua and the public entity here called the Borough. The "challenges" arise from the chronic and "clandestine"--as in, NON-transparent, deviation from their public power and responsibilities that our public officials have pursued over the last few decades--a deviation that I have found that they hide by failing to quash the misconceptions that:

1. we will get poor public services if the "deviations" are questioned;
2. we will get poor public service if transparency is asked for;
3. we will get poor public service if we do not have two or more entities doing exactly the same jobs here; or
4. that they are the only ones capable of serving us to our satisfaction.

So, by referring to primary sources and government documents themselves, we are going to find out exactly what public bodies and officials can and can't do, what they should and shouldn't do, and what they must and must not do.

We are going to clear up, once and for all, this whole notion that we need to pay an EXTRA $450,000 a year to have our 3.2 miles of road plowed and maintained to our satisfaction, to have our water delivered to our 210 homes to our satisfaction, and to have our 210 homes' toilets carry sewage away to our satisfaction.1