PAY UP! Guv again seeking $25 per person fee for towns that do not have own police

There are 2,571 municipalities in Pennsylvania and yet 1,700 of them rely on the Pennsylvania State Police to provide full- or part-time police coverage. The 4,300 enlisted troopers on the force work out of 16 barracks across the commonwealth with jurisdiction over 82 percent of the state and about one-fourth (3.3 million) of the population.

Almost all counties have some mix of local and state police coverage while Philadelphia is the only county providing its own local police throughout, but a handful of counties had all of their municipalities relying solely on the state police.

At an annual operating budget of $1.2 billion, it is not a cheap law enforcement body to fund, but the 1,700 municipalities who receive their police protection essentially get it for free while everyone else has their property taxes pay for a local police force.

To provide new revenue streams to the force Gov. Tom Wolf again proposed a $25 per capita fee to municipalities that use state police coverage when he announced his 2018-19 budget proposal in Harrisburg on Feb. 6.

Wolf made the same proposal last year, but it was ultimately killed. It looks to happen again. “Proposing this plan again was just going to be dead on arrival,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Stan Saylor, R-94 of York County. “I spoke to the governor prior to his address months before: As I told him last year when he proposed it, it wasn’t going to fly here.

“I explained to him very simply that if you look at the General Assembly, that kind of a proposal will never get the votes simply because there are too many state reps and senators who come from areas where they don’t have local police.”

Saylor added that he agrees with Wolf’s idea to recover some of the costs that go to funding the state police.

Currently, about $235 million in the general fund is appropriated to the force, but another $800 million comes from the motor license fund – known as the transportation fund which is used for repairing state roads, bridges and other infrastructure. License

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SUBMITTED PHOTOS

SCREENCAPS BY KEVIN TUSTIN This map shows all the municipalities in the state and their respective police coverage. The gray shows the communities receiving full-time coverage by the Pennsylvania State Police while the dark blue indicates full-time local coverage. Light blue is...

SUBMITTED PHOTO

SCREENCAPS BY KEVIN TUSTIN The Pennsylvania State Police provided this table on how their coverage has changed in the past five years. There are 2,571 municipalities throughout the state, 1,700 provided with police service by the state police.