Opinion: Milesburg is too small to succeed. Consolidation offers a solution

The borough of Milesburg is breaking news, which usually doesn’t happen except when it rains a lot and the community suffers flood damage from the Bald Eagle and Spring creeks. Now the news is not created by Mother Nature but is self-inflicted.

Depending on the latest headline, borough council has gone through some tumultuous times. It all began — although when actually may never be known — after the new council reorganized at the beginning of the year and the borough manager and four other borough employees resigned. In subsequent months, four members of the seven-member council also resigned. In effect, 181-year-old Milesburg was leaderless and rudderless.

Before the ship seemed to self-right in mid-April, resident Bryce Taylor spoke at a meeting of the Centre County commissioners. I watched that meeting on C-NET and I could hear the anguish in Taylor’s voice as he explained the situation and talked longer than his alloted five minutes. His plea was so heartfelt that board chair Mark Higgins encouraged him to continue talking. And he did.

I consider Milesburg the proverbial canary in the coal mine, but it’s hardly the first small municipality to seemingly tank. Consider Tioga in Tioga County, little more than half the size of Milesburg and fraught with small-town issues enumerated in detail by Spotlight PA. Tioga’s in-fighting came to a head when the borough hired without a background check a police officer who had killed a child in Cleveland. Even before that, petty squabbles disrupted life in Tioga.

The stories about the borough of Tioga got me to thinking about what the larger problem was and the answer came rather quickly. The borough is simply to small to succeed. I realize now that Milesburg is in the same boat. You need a critical population mass in order to achieve and succeed and Tioga and Milesburg have neither. Tioga’s population is 608 and Milesburg’s is 1123, and both are in decline.

What is the solution?

Both boroughs and others like them need to go out of business and become part of their respective townships. It is not an uncommon situation in Pennsylvania. Look at Zion, Pleasant Gap, Lemont, Boalsburg and Pine Grove Mills, for example. Unincorporated communities, they all exist without municipal governments within townships and it is the townships that govern them.

There’s a quick way to solve Milesburg’s situation and a long-term suggestion. The quick way (well, relatively quick) is for Milesburg to merge with Boggs Township. In Clearfield County, voters in Dubois and Sandy Township voted to consolidate and create an community of 19,000. It surprised me to learn that the township had a larger population than the city of Dubois.

Long term, the commonwealth needs to get involved in helping municipalities too small to succeed to find a way out of the morass of failure. Becoming part of a township could be a start. Combining low-population townships might even be part of the scheme. Look, if we could reduce the number of school districts from 2500 to 500, we can create successful municipalities.

It just takes some will and some foresight.

R Thomas Berner served on State College Borough Council for 11.5 years in the last century. He is now a freelance writer and photographer.