Towns using state police not getting free ride
To the Times: I must disagree with the thought that those municipalities that elect to utilize the state police instead of forming their own police departments are “getting a free ride.”
Every resident of the Commonwealth that pays taxes is paying for the services of the Pennsylvania State Police through the part of their taxes paid that goes toward the public safety portion of the state budget. Every resident of every municipality in the Commonwealth is entitled to the protection of the state police, but there are municipalities that elect to enhance this service by having their own municipal police departments and the residents of these municipalities, have through their own choice to live in these municipalities, decided that they desire to pay the extra expense associated with these local police departments.
To say that more than half the state’s municipalities have state police protection that does not cost them a cent is a fallacy because none of the municipalities pays for the state police protection, it is the individual citizens that pay for the protection through the payment of state taxes. In fact, those municipalities that have their own police departments are reimbursed to some extent by the state through grants and a portion of the revenue from traffic tickets. If a municipal police officer issues the ticket about half of the cost is allocated to the municipality, while when a state trooper issues the ticket half of the cost is allocated to a fund that is divided among all the municipalities.
If Gov. Tom Wolf wants to free up funds to pay for our eroding infrastructure he should instead look to eliminate the waste within the processes of the PennDOT and Pa. Turnpike Commission when contracting out the work on our roads and bridges.
Several years ago while I was still working, I commuted on Route 202 to King of Prussia and at the time they were resurfacing a portion of the highway. Much to my surprise within less than a year they were again resurfacing that same stretch of highway because it had deteriorated to the point where it needed resurfacing again. This is no one-time occurrence if one travels to any of the surrounding states you can immediately tell when you leave Pennsylvania as the road surface is greatly improved. It seems that either our standards for the road surface material is deficient, or the PennDOT is not compelling the contractors use of materials that meet our standards. Maybe Pennsylvania should send representatives to study the methods that our neighboring states use for highway maintenance and adapt to their standards.
Another area of waste the could be addressed is the is the millions of dollars spent constructing sound barriers along our major highways. These barriers are only supposed to be erected by PennDOT when a major highway is constructed through an area that has homes that pre-existed the highway, yet I see this construction occurring in areas where we are improving the existing highway where there are homes that were put in after the highway was constructed. Talk about paying your fair share, there are only a small percentage of our citizens that live in these areas, compared to the entire tax paying population, that benefit from this construction of the sound barriers and we are all paying this expense. If a person buys a home near a major highway, then they should expect the noise associated with the highway and not expect all the rest of the tax paying population to pay for making the area livable for them
Gov. Wolf should now look to increase our taxes, but instead should look to methods for decreasing the waste government spending!