Taxpayers shouldn’t pay for constables

Taxpayers in Berks County can’t seem to get a break when it comes to constables.

Taxpayers in Berks County can’t seem to get a break when it comes to constables.

First we learned this year that the county covered an estimated $400,000 to pay constables working out of Reading in 2017. Those costs are paid by taxpayers when those arrested do not pay state-set fines meant to cover the cost of serving them warrants.

A Reading Eagle analysis of data from the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts found the tab here was far higher than any other county in the state.

Stories about that rather scandalous statistic included a proposal by state Rep. Barry Jozwiak, a Bern Township Republican and former Berks County sheriff, to do away with constables by attrition and turn their duties over to the sheriff’s office.

The trouble with that approach became clear in a recent Reading Eagle report about the elimination of state funding for firearms training and certification.

Joshua Z. Stouch, a constable in Douglass Township, Montgomery County, and legislative director of the Commonwealth Constables Association, said there’s an easy fix: Raise the $5 fee that’s been tacked on each warrant served by a constable since 1994 to train constables.

“The simple solution would be to raise that $5 fee to bring in enough revenue to fund training,” Stouch said.

“But, I’m told no legislator wants to put their name on any fee increase because it sounds too much like a tax increase.”

Declining revenues and rising training costs have led the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency to cut funding for constables’ firearms training by 75%, on the theory that 16 hours of continuing education can be cut to four hours.

State Rep. Thomas R. Caltagirone, a Reading Democrat, believes the current situation will result in constables losing their firearms certification and being unable to work as a result.

Jozwiak believes his proposal to phase constables out and transfer their work to the offices of county sheriffs would solve this problem.

“I have a bill that would eliminate them (the constable system),” he said recently. “They (constables) are a vestige of a bygone era that has no place in the 21st century.”

This leads county officials to worry about the Legislature’s 21st century habit of shifting costs downward.

Berks Sheriff Eric J. Weaknecht says his office could do the constables’ work with the money generated by constable fees.

“The funding would cover salaries, benefits, equipment and other costs for maybe three to four deputies,” Weaknecht said. “We could not do the work the constables do with that number of people.”

But the added work would require hiring additional deputies to continue transporting prisoners and providing security for the county’s lower courts.

And that bill would go to county taxpayers. That’s not a cost the state seems willing to cover, according to Berks commissioners Chairman Christian Y. Leinbach.

“The idea that the county could ever save money by eliminating constables and putting that work on the sheriffs is ludicrous,” he said.

“The county taxpayers are going to get stuck with funding something the state should be taking care of,” he said.

On one level, it probably should not make that much difference whether something is funded at the state or county level. Taxpayers will pay it either way.

But Leinbach’s point is well taken regarding the constable situation when two things are considered:

In doing away with constables over time and pushing their work to county sheriffs, state lawmakers would be taking credit for modernizing and reforming our state’s judicial system without covering, its costs.

The burden in this case would shift from income, sales and other taxes collected at the state level to county property taxes — a big complaint of many voters, especially senior citizens, a group state lawmakers would rather burden indirectly by shifting costs downward.

It’s the dishonesty of the exercise that’s most bothersome. If state lawmakers want to switch the serving of warrants from state-funded constables to county-funded sheriffs’ offices, they should acknowledge the cost and find a way to pay it.