Pennsylvania Ranked the 41st Best State

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Originally Posted by thecoalman

I don't disagree they should pay something but some of those communities call the state police and they get their up to 30 minutes later assuming they are already doing something. Secondly they would be patrolling those areas with or without local police.

While I agree generally with what you are saying, PA has an issue with some wealthier communities not paying their fair share and taking advantage of state services. For instance, in Erie county we have Fairview and Summit townships, which are two of the wealthiest areas of Erie county and they do not have a local police force or pay for state police services. This increases the burden on other residents of Erie county and the rest of the state. In other words, why would someone in the city of Erie or Millcreek township have to pay for their own police force and pay for state police force protection for Fairview and Summit townships also? Additionally, I would like to point out that I have seen the state police respond quickly to a shoplifting incident that I witnessed in Summit township.

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Originally Posted by Duderino

That's the tip of the iceberg. The fundamental problem with PA government is the unsustainable and absurd amount of fragmentation for public services, period. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it's the single biggest impediment to progress across the state.

My hope is that when the Millennial generation begins to take more and more control, there's going to be a seachange in how government is administered. Regional cooperation and even *gasp* consolidation has to take place.

It's the only way forward if many townships/boroughs/cities want a future in any sense of the word.

This is a great point and it is shocking how many municipalities we have in the state of Pennsylvania.

[bradjl2009]

Originally Posted by Duderino

That's the tip of the iceberg. The fundamental problem with PA government is the unsustainable and absurd amount of fragmentation for public services, period. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it's the single biggest impediment to progress across the state.

My hope is that when the Millennial generation begins to take more and more control, there's going to be a seachange in how government is administered. Regional cooperation and even *gasp* consolidation has to take place.

It's the only way forward if many townships/boroughs/cities want a future in any sense of the word.

Yeah, it's ridiculous how many exist, and so many of them have no business still being a thing too.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by SteelCityRising

Not sure how "fiscal stability/environment" is measured?

"Fiscal Stability" and "Natural Environment" are two separate categories in the U.S. News rankings; Pennsylvania ranked 38th in each.

I'm surprised at that 38th-place ranking in natural environment. I guess the environmental problems left behind by our extractive industries cancel out our excellent state parks and conservation lands. (Pennsylvania was an early leader in that regard; Gov. Gifford Pinchot is better known for his record as a conservationist than as the guy who kept a form of Prohibition alive in Pennsylvania via other means.)

Originally Posted by cpomp

Not to nitpick but South Dakota has less people than Montgomery County, and Montana and Idaho have less than Philadelphia, and the rest have less than the Philadelphia area.

My guess is that the population in those states is more centralized in small pockets, PA has densely and sparely populated areas from one end to the other.

Native Missourian here, commenting more on the posts that followed this one.

I know you know that I map my native and adopted home states onto each other because they have a number of things in common, as I've said often on the Philadelphia board.

Among them: large amounts of rural territory, aging populations, two large cities at opposite ends of the state whose economic fortunes seem to be diverging but are closer to each other than residents of both would care to admit.

But - and this is IMO relevant in that discussion of Internet service - you could fit Pennsylvania into Missouri and have room left over: the state has more land area than any state east of the Mississippi.

(I do wonder, though, if 80 percent of all Missourians live in the two big metros. Just as one-third of Greater Philadelphia lives in three other states, nearly half - 45 percent - of Greater Kansas Citians live in Kansas; the metro is the most evenly split of all bi-state metros in the US. Still, divide Greater Kansas City's population by 2 and I think you still get at least two-thirds of all Missourians living in KC and StL.)

What that means is that you have to string wire, lay fiber and erect cell towers across a greater land area in Missouri.

Originally Posted by thecoalman

And how much of that is dependent on other parts of the state? Comcast for example?





And you would die without the rest of the state.

Originally Posted by thecoalman

I didn't say they were wholly dependent on the rest of PA, the point is a significant part of their revenue is derived from the rest of PA. If you were going to make fair comparison you cannot attribute all of that to Philly.


If you were draw some border around the more uban areas creating libtopia cutting them off from conservatopia.... My first question for you is where are you going to gas and coal to create the power required for those cities? Milk, eggs and beef? Numerous other resources?

Conservatopia would also suffer because they have lost a significant revenue stream for their products but alt least they will have warm homes and be able to turn the lights on. Rural and urban economies are dependent on each other.



At no point did I claim anything like that, I'm from NEPA... Any East/West arguments are just as ridiculous as the rural/urban ones.

I agree with you 100 percent that urban and rural Pennsylvania need one another. After all, even if we were to turn every vacant lot in Philadelphia into a garden and mandate that every suburban lawn become cropland, we still couldn't feed ourselves off our own resources. It's the agricultural surplus that makes cities possible, and that's been the case since agriculture began.

And the stereotypes about urbanites being clueless about where food comes from are based in some truth, though I think that it's less true now than it once was. And it may be even less true in Philadelphia, whose public school district has run an agricultural magnet high school since the late 1950s. I think that W.B. Saul Agricultural High School may be the only urban high school in the country with a farming curriculum.

But I think part of the problem does belong on the shoulders of the rural folk - and I'll explain why with a strictly-Philadelphia analogy.

For most of the last half of the 20th century, as its hinterlands switched from growing crops to sprouting houses, Philadelphia and its suburbs had a hostile relationship. I don't think it would be too much of an exaggeration to say that the attitude among suburbanites was that if a bomb were to be dropped on Broad and Market (Philadelphia City Hall) the next day, life beyond the city borders would go on unaffected, or maybe even get better.

It's taken about six decades to eradicate that attitude, starting in the 1960s. (SEPTA was one of the first efforts in that direction.) And it hasn't disappeared completely. But most of our regional elected officials and business leaders now know that we compete as a region on the world stage, not as individual communities against each other locally.

It seems to me that Pennsylvanians in the "T" have a similar attitude towards the cities, especially Philadelphia. (The epithet hurled by outstate residents at Ed Rendell, the first Philadelphian to be elected governor since 1910, was that he was "the Governor of Philadelphia.") The Southeast is the state's leading economic engine and has been for some time now, and the Southeast wouldn't be as strong as it is without Philadelphia's presence, its stubbornly high poverty and Chicago-style politics notwithstanding. (And it's not like they're paragons of virtue in Harrisburg either, and where did that scandal where judges basically sold kids up the river for cash take place anyway?)

But I'll happily continue to eat Pennsylvania produce, drink Pennsylvania spirits (the Southeast and the Lehigh Valley are home to several outstanding distillers, and let's not forget Yuengling in Pottsville) and run my gadgets off electricity generated by turbines spinning on mountaintops overlooking Altoona. (I switched to a 100 percent renewable electricity supplier a few years ago.) We really are all in this together, and the sooner all of us understand this, the better off this Commonwealth will be.

[Duderino]

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

"Fiscal Stability" and "Natural Environment" are two separate categories in the U.S. News rankings; Pennsylvania ranked 38th in each.

I'm surprised at that 38th-place ranking in natural environment. I guess the environmental problems left behind by our extractive industries cancel out our excellent state parks and conservation lands. (Pennsylvania was an early leader in that regard; Gov. Gifford Pinchot is better known for his record as a conservationist than as the guy who kept a form of Prohibition alive in Pennsylvania via other means.)

Exactly. Pennsylvania has great reason to be proud of its fantastic land conservation efforts (even today, the state continues to be very aggressive in preserving farmland/open space), but not for its historic air/water/soil pollution resulting from heavy industry.

Thankfully, renewable energy seems to finally be taking off as it needs to (as everyone is aware, fossil fuel special interest groups--and the legislators kowtowing to them--hold back progress immensely):

https://www.post-gazette.com/busines...s/201905260025

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by Duderino

Thankfully, renewable energy seems to finally be taking off as it needs to (as everyone is aware, fossil fuel special interest groups--and the legislators kowtowing to them--hold back progress immensely):

https://www.post-gazette.com/busines...s/201905260025

When it's 0 degrees out, the sun isn't shining, the wind isn't blowing, utilities are hitting peak demand records at 7AM and it's going to be like that for the next week you will be relying on coal, gas and nuclear for power.



The primary issue with this is a large part of your electric bill is capital investment in those plants. Solar and wind is only supplementary and as its use increases it necessarily increases the cost of power from those plants because they run less. You can never remove that capital investment.