Let the counties handle services

It might be impossible to calculate the unnecessary costs that Pennsylvania's 2,566 units of local government impose on their residents. The toll is not only in the form of redundant administration and services, but in lost economic opportunities due to burdensome local regulation by multiple governments.

The Pennsylvania Economy League has estimated that the unnecessary excess costs of local wage tax collections alone is about $237 million a year. Yet when the state Legislature passed a sound law to eliminate that waste, reducing the number of wage tax collectors statewide from nearly 600 to just 69, many local officials objected to the diminishment of their political turf.

So Rep. Thomas Caltagirone, a Reading Democrat, can expect similar opposition to his sweeping proposal to vastly reduce the cost of local government across the commonwealth. It would save hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but at the expense of some local politicians' power.

The bill, a precursor to a state constitutional amendment, would give county governments jurisdiction for all public safety, public works, zoning, garbage collection and other governmental functions within county borders. Rather than 2,566 governments arranging for those services, there would be 67.

That is just what is needed. It would much more fairly distribute the true costs of government, which are regional rather than hyper-local in nature. Scranton taxpayers, for example, no longer would be solely responsible for the service burden attached to scores of tax-exempt institutions that serve an array of needs for the entire region.

Such an arrangement would ensure shared services, combined purchasing and other methods to hold down costs while offering consistently high levels of service.

Given that the bill steps on the toes of literally tens of thousands of local public officials, it has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. Until Pennsylvania's culture of badly fragmented local government changes along the lines suggested by Caltagirone's bill, local taxpayers will continue to throw away tens of millions of dollars a year for the sake of political turf protection. With billions of dollars worth of unfunded local public pension obligations, hundreds of one-person part-time police forces, convoluted zoning that stymies economic development, and myriad other examples of poor governance, it's not clear why local officials think that they can afford it.