Now that Emmaus Borough Council has tabled plans for a $750,000 baseball field renovation, in large part due to uncertainty about whether the borough would receive a $300,000 grant from Lehigh County, the borough manager is asking for the money anyway.
"That money is our money," Craig Neely told the Morning Call, unwittingly providing an illustration of the perils of government dependency, and the absurdity inherent in the government grant process.
Of course, the money in the county's Green Futures Fund belongs to the taxpayers of Lehigh County, but every borough, township and city in the county believes, naturally, they should get their fair share of it. However, if Emmaus got what was fair, it would receive only that portion of the fund that was sent in to the County government by its own residents.
Which leads to the obvious question: Why send the money to the county government in the first place?
The only way it makes sense for Emmaus residents to do that is if the money will be inequitably disbursed by the county -- more for Emmaus than for, say, Catasauqua or Alburtis. Otherwise, each municipality would simply use locally-raised revenues to do local projects, and bypass the middle man (the county).
This scenario plays itself out at the state and federal government levels as well. Our politicians in Harrisburg and Washington frequently come home with giant cardboard checks -- gifts from above. But whose money is that? And why should we send it to a distant place, where they're less likely to understand our local needs, and then have to submit a grant application to get our "fair share" sent back to us? Experts in the distant capital city sit in judgment as to whether our needs are appropriate to our community.
Does that make sense? After all, that money is...whose money?
