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.

Testing your child actor trivia...

So I was in Philly earlier this week, wasting time until I could go visit a friend and her new baby. I plunked down at a cafe near old city and ordered us a whole bunch of food to go (nursing moms always accept gifts of food, I found). It was well before noon.

I was the only one there, so the bartender was flipping through my photos with me and we were chatting about artists we both liked, like Fionna Apple. Then these three guys walk in and the one all decked out in black and silver orders, in a very specific way:
"one shot of cuervo, then add one shot of baileys, and then one shot of kahlua, and, if there is any room left to add coffee, make sure its hot."

I will give 1 months free supply of grid lines to the first person that correctly identifies which bad boy, child actor ended up sitting beside me.

More details on the Borough's use of public resources

A reader posted a comment on a recent post here and asked several questions.
In providing the answers to the reader's questions, I thought that the information in the answers should be made available in a more general way. So, I am posting the answer as a new post, rather than as a comment embedded in an older post.

JB, I will try to answer each of your questions in the order that you asked them.

First, the "other places" are all private entities, and there are at least four (4) of them. Three of these private entities are located completely outside our Borough's municipal boundaries, and one private corporation is located within the Borough boundaries. Yes, Campmeeting is one of them. THe others are Conewago Hill, the Mount Gretna Heights (which is the Campmeeting "heights"--not the Chautauqua "heights"), the Pennsylvania Chautauqua.

Second, the "sharing" relationships may or may not be "under a contract." The Borough currently has four snow-plowing/removal contracts with outside entities--three are with private parties, one is with a public party. However, regardless of the existence of these contracts, state law (Borough Code, Section 1703) clearly prohibits the Borough taking or assuming "any interest" in a road that is an undedicated road--i.e. those private roads belonging to homeowners associations. So, even with the contract with the public entity--S. Londonderry, if the roads being plowed are not dedicated, this is still a problem for the MG Borough.

Cornwall Borough recently had to deal with this very same issue--a homeowners association or development asked them to plow the development's road(s), and their solicitor correctly advised them that the law prohibited the municipality from using public resources to do this work for this private entity. (See their Jan 2010 Meeting Minutes, available at their website)

Further, the salt and anti-skid materials used in these contracts are typically paid for with State funds (Liquid Fuels funds), so the Borough must use those materials on their own roads--the roads that triggered the State to share Liquid Fuels monies with the Borough. So, unless the Borough used its own, NON-Liquid Fuels funds to purchase the materials used for these contracts, here we would have another violation of state law.

Further, if you try to get details on that "sharing relationship" between the Chautauqua (a private corporation) and the Borough (a public entity), the Borough only provides a copy of 1988 Council meeting minutes where they voted to start billing the Pennsylvania Chautauqua "on a monthly basis for payroll." Note the word "payroll"--that is an important word, so I will comment more on that below. The PA Chautauqua, being on the other end of the "agreement", simply refuses to provide the information, wrongfully claiming that they are a private company and that, as such, the Open Records Act does not apply. I say "wrongfully" for two reasons: First, in their own tax filings to the IRS, they repeatedly report that such "working documents" are made available to the public upon request. And, second, the Open Records law clearly applies to private entities that are performing or delivering something to a public entity. At a minimum, when either entity is asked for details on that relationship, the Borough will be "deemed" to have access to the information even if it is being kept by the Chautauqua, and must "retrieve" and provide the information.

The other problem with the "sharing relationship" between the Chautauqua (a private corporation) and the MG Borough (a public entity)is that the transaction does not seem to be accurately--or maybe not honestly, reported. For example, The Borough reports that it "shares" Linda Bell with the Chautauqua, meaning that a large percentage of her work and pay is allocated to the Chautauqua. Linda Bell is also the Chautauqua's Financial Secretary. Further, in working their General Fund numbers--numbers not neccessarily reported to the IRS, the Chautauqua numbers detailing its "transfer" to the Borough are broken down into things like salaries, health insurance benefits, State Pension Fund monies, etc.

However, when reporting to the IRS, the Chautauqua indicates that:
1. It has no labor costs.
2. It does not pay any of its officers or it volunteers; and
3. Its transfer to the Borough (reported as intergovernmental transfer) is a fraction of the "labor-costs" that it actually pays to the Borough. For example, the Chautauqua's General Fund breakdown could indicate that it transfers 100k to the Borough in one year, but their IRS Tax Form 990 would report only a 30K transfer to the Borough.

Now, let me wrap this all up by reminding everyone that any type of sharing relationship is supposed to benefit the taxpayer in terms of provision of services that protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public.

And, just because the Chautauqua says that it serves as a "billings and collection conduit" to promote efficiencies and to reduce the cost to the taxpayer, that statement may not really be true. For example, in reality, we have a water/sewer authority that sends us water bills, and the same person that sends us those water bills is the same person that sends us our shareholder assessment bills (which contain our sewer bills). It is not reasonable to think that this parsing out of the sewer bill is an efficiency when there are only 200 or so bills to be sent and when it would take much less time and effort to simply include the sewer charges in with the water bill and send the payment back to the same Authority address in the same envelope.

So, is it really an "efficiency" then to involve a third party--a private entity, to collect sewer fees here, or is it just a way to avoid transparency and the sharing of information with the same public that you are collecting monies from?

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.