Hershey, chocolate and unincorporated 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.

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







1. As a footnote, I am not mentioning "policing done to our satisfaction," because after talking to over 70 of you personally and hearing well over half of you state that you have been commenting and complaining yourself to Borough officials about enforcing traffic laws like speeding and got no response--much less a satisfing response, many of you have revealed that this extra money is apparently NOT purchasing, for us anyway, completely satisfying, much less exceptional, service. In fact, just two weeks ago a long time resident and former council member again stated that speeding has been complained about for many, many years here, and that there indeed have been some tragic accidents. So, since this safety and quality of life issue appears to have remain unaddressed, police service should be considered in more detail in and of itself.

For those of you curious as to how police service "deliverables" are measured and who may want to do a little research before that analysis is done, let me refer you to the PA State Gov's manual on police services, which spends ample text explaining how to measure whether the police are really delivering to the community an effective and efficient service. Go to the www.newpa.gov site and look through their library of manuals to find it. My reference to that manual and its formula is not to say, however, that one needs a government derived formula to tell you what you already know to be a failure.

And, as a bit of humor on this topic, did you know that if you saw a cop driving dangerously through a pedestrian crosswalk and called him an asshole in hopes of getting his attention and getting him to slow down, he has no legal basis for arresting you. In other words, calling an errant cop exactly what he is acting as is First Amendment protected speech--not criminal misconduct. But that doesn't mean they won't abuse their power and try to arrest you anyway, which is a case a lady won right here in PA not too long ago when she caught a cop plowing through a grocery store pedestrian walkway and barely missing a mom with her young 'uns. He had no sirens, horns, flashers, and no "scene" to go to, so the witness informed the cop "its a crosswalk, asshole."

And, yes, Toto, there are errant and under-performing cops out there, just like there are corrupt public officials, and errant taxmen. There are even neighbors in tiny quaint villages--communities just like ours, that "swap spouses," organize "key clubs," or even commit "crimes of passion" like shooting their own beloved wife...If there was no deviant behavior out there--whether intentional or accidental, then why would we even need police in the first place? Assuming that they can't or don't make mistakes, whether accidental or intentional, is a completely inappropriate assumption to place on these public servants. It absolutely is appropriate for the public to question the delivery of police services to its community, and those who seek to take away or weaken the public's authority to demand efficient or even better police service are, well, just being wankers and maybe even bullies. So, we certainly will be analyzing the Cornwall PD numbers for the last few years and revealing their true effectiveness and service as compared to our repeatedly stated community needs and characteristics, and to their costs to us. Only, we will finish this venture first.