Our Pennsylvania Constitution believes in the principle that the more democracy there is, the better it is. That’s why it has placed so much critical decisionmaking power in the hands of elected officials at the township level.  

It’s why we in Lancaster County have 60 – count ‘em – 60 municipalities for half a million people. And these elected municipal officials make the critical decisions that affect our daily lives. They decide whether we’re going to have a Wal-Mart or not. They decide whether your street gets paved this year or ten years from now. They decide whether you can have a septic system or whether you’ll have to hook up to a sewer system.

These are basic decisions that can make your life better or worse. And by having 60 separate municipalities in Lancaster, the framers of our constitution wanted you to have easy access to those decisionmakers. They wanted you to be shopping at the supermarkets they shop at; they wanted you to pick up a quart of milk at the same convenience stores they stop in at; they wanted you to know where their homes are, a couple of blocks away from you. In short, they wanted you to have the easy opportunity to talk to these decisionmakers – your decisionmakers – if you had any ideas for them, or praise, or complaints.

Two townships come to mind in this light, for opposite reasons.

Lancaster Township recently took a look at their police coverage. The Township has been contracting with the Lancaster City police for years, and the arrangement by and large has been satisfactory. One of the great benefits for the Township is their ability to call on the significant resources of the City police department for those unusually serious occasions. Yet residents keep an eye on things: sometimes one will complain that they haven’t seen a patrol car on their street in a long while; another will note that a patrol car with the lettering “Lancaster Twp” was seen inside the city on a call.

So a few weeks ago, the supervisors re-examined the contract and relationship, and they discussed possible alternatives. In the end, they found that overall, they had a very good arrangement, especially since the City and Township are in many places very similar one to the other.

This is the kind of attention to detail you want of supervisors. It makes for better government, and the residents of Lancaster Township, the next time they bump into one of the supervisors, whether at the gas station or the post office, should thank them for going to this trouble for their benefit.

By contrast, we have the burgeoning story coming out of Drumore Township, where questions are being raised about possible misprision of office by one of the supervisors in paving contracts. Paving is one of those expensive tasks that necessarily happens out in the open, but the contracting doesn’t always. And this is where the Pennsylvania Constitution made it easy for the residents to ask any questions they might have directly of their supervisors.

News accounts tell of an anonymous tipster who found cause for serious concern and called in the Auditor General’s office. The auditors have accused the named supervisor of wrongfully allocating $134,000 in road work to his own firm. Unfortunately, the other two supervisors were blithely unaware of this whole matter.

But the point here is that local officeholders can be effectively watched, if not by their elected colleagues, then by others in the neighborhood. And we can thank the Pennsylvania Constitution for making that easier.