Note that once a law enforcement officer or firefighter retires, they will never receive a cost-of-living increase; whatever they receive when first received will be the amount they collect for the rest of their lives. And neither is eligible for Social Security benefits on their earnings while in uniform.
The only way to bring the cost of local government under control is to do away with all municipal boundaries within Lancaster County: one police force, one fire department, one school district, and only one local government for the entire county.
It’s often been said that government should be run more like a business; what business would cut a territory the size of Lancaster County into so many pieces? The duplicate overhead alone costs local taxpayers many millions of dollars every year.
I would have agreed that municipal boundary elimination could reduce gov’t cost, but recent developments have shown that the little fiefdoms may come to reduce costs as well. Mayor Rick Gray recently tried to dump city cost burdens on Lancaster Twp in the form of increased police costs. Lanc Twp bid out the police service and saved several hundred thousand dollars a year.
Later, (I believe) Mountville also switched from Manor Twp police to Hempfield police.
This inter municipality competition may, hopefully, bring some reduction of the over-generous, arbitrator-granted benefit packages achieved by some gov’t workers.
BTW, I have nothing against the gov’t workers.