Calling state mandates "entangling intrusions" in an open letter posted on the borough website in December, Mayor Paul Anzano proposed an apparently unprecedented solution: Dissolve the community's municipal charter and establish the borough as a nonprofit entity.
That's from Hopewell, New Jersey, and the odds are against that happening or even receiving serious deliberation. For the pointer I thank Igor Pleskov.
This sounds like something that will involve years of work and negotiation, thousands of dollars in meetings, lawyer fees, lobbying fees, etc…
And then a judge will tell them that state mandates apply to all municipal governing entities, including a non-profit corporation-as-government.
Here in PA, I know of at least one township that consists almost entirely of a golf course. There are maybe a half dozen houses included. This was done to wiggle through a loophole in the laws governing liquor licenses. A township here has the same relative standing as a city or borough.
Anthony,
Leaving aside the the county/boro issue, is the $30,000 worth anything net?
Of course, there is nothing “private” about nonprofit corporations; they are “owned” by the public and represented by the public through their board of directors (who are generally barred from earning salaries/benefits).
The salient difference, I think, resides in how boards/municipalities are elected. Boards are generally elected by their board members (with term-limits), while municipalities are elected by their constituents.
On first flush, isn’t this a difference between oligarchy/ plutarchy (as board members are more often than not loaded), and representative government?
I’ve sometimes wondered if we could go the other direction and “privatize” some of the national bureaucracies. The idea would be that you’d have several entities that could, for instance, be the equivalent of the EPA, banking regulators, etc. States or local governments could “hire” them and “fire them”, and they’d be paid out of state taxes.
The national government would disband these bureaucracies and would only establish federal standards that would be minimum requirements for being a hire-able organization. If states want their own, they’d set it up.
The good thing is that there’d be a sort of market for bureaucratic “goods”, with states able to choose between, say, a hard-core eco-fanatic EPA that may be favored by California and a business-friendly one that may be favored by Texas.
Also, since the costs of these agencies would be clearly visible to the States, the bureaucracy would be at least somewhat more responsive. And if a given bureaucracy lost all its state clients, it would go out of business and dissolve.
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