Berks County is home to 73 municipalities. They range in population from 35 people (New Morgan Borough) to over 80,000 (Reading).

It’d be hard to find anyone who thought that, in theory, it made sense to have 73 separate municipalities doing all the things they do (police protection, zoning, codes enforcement, recreation,etc.). It just doesn’t make sense from any perspective other than an historical one.

Context is important. Pennsylvania is home to about 11% of all the municipalities in the United States.  We have, along with Illinois an odd and unexplainable affinity for having lots of small, inefficient government.

So, why is it still so? With voters clamoring for government to limit spending, why maintain the overhead of a bunch of duplicative little municipalities?

I should acknowledged that Berks County actually leads Pennsylvania in having its municipalities cooperate with each other. There are many shared-service and shared-purchasing agreements among municipalities. We’re home to a record number of joint municipal planning agreements.

Much of this cooperation is due to decades of good work by the Center for Excellence in Local Government and the county’s planning commission.

But still, a lot of local governments.

One reason that we probably haven’t moved more aggressively toward the consolidation of municipal services is that there’s not a good vehicle to do it. And by that, I mean our current form of county government.

At least some of the problems are statutory. Exploration by the county commissioners a few years ago of opportunities to regionalize police services pointed out that Pennsylvania law doesn’t allow counties to create police forces. That took one logical option off of the table.

There are non-statutory issues as well. It’s interesting to note that county government could do lots of other things but doesn’t.  And it might not matter how many municipalities there were if the county provided a broader range of municipal services.

One big problem is the form of government. It wasn’t really designed to provide municipal services; it was designed to provide a very limited number of things like jails, a county nursing home and maybe maintain some bridges. Without a clearly identified chief executive who’s responsible, County government is an amalgam of “run by committee” functions that don’t inspire much confidence.  

What’s worse is that between state mandates and the presence of elected row officers that oversee many of the county’s functions (we elect a coroner?) it’s pretty clear that nobody is really “in charge” in the way they’d have to be to efficiently make sure that zoning, planning and police protection are delivered.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the way we’ve structured municipal government from top to bottom. If taxpayers want better services delivered less expensively, it’s worth a look.

Last week, the Reading Eagle ran an editorial calling for the study of a home rule form of government for Berks County. Given what we know, it’s hard to come up with a good reason not to at least consider our options.

Tags: Municipality | County Government | Reading Eagle Company | Berks County