Mercer County, Pa.

[wv_mountaineer]

I came across this in the Sharon Herald Paper...


NORTHERN MERCER COUNTY — Officials from two more municipalities Tuesday jumped on the train toward investigating combining police services in northwestern Mercer County.

Greenville council members and South Pymatuning Township supervisors authorized participating in a feasibility study about forming a regional police department that would cover Sharpsville, Pymatuning, South Pymatuning and Greenville-West Salem townships.

This was just a snip-it from the full article, but it is enough to get the point across.

 

[HM1529]

With the economic difficulties so many areas of PA are seeing, I am really surprised that regionalization of many local services (not just police) is not more seriously pursued. We could even stand to have a few *gasp* mergers of some municipalities across PA. 2256 local governments, 501 school districts, and 67 counties.

I found it interesting that several years back, Cameron County looked in to merging all the local governments with the county government because there is not enough tax base in the county to support all the governments and several local governments operate with incomplete staffing due to a lack of both interested parties and qualified parties. And, yet, the citizens ended up voting the proposal down in the end. Seems they'd rather have a township with no staff than a consolidated county government in an area where hardly anyone lives. The study results were available online. You can Google it if you want to read the study.

 

[wv_mountaineer]

Mercer County Fire & EMS alerts.

A friend turned me onto this Facebook page. It is for Mercer County Fire & EMS Alerts. Their page address is:

Welcome to Facebook

Check it out and sign up for SMS alerts on your cell phone. I did it yesterday and it seems to works pretty good. It's already allowed me to figure out what I missed on the scanner as I went outside. When I got back inside the house the scanner was was doing it thing and I had no clue what was happening. So I picked up the cell phone and there was the info I needed to learn just what I missed. I am sure it's not as good as having the scanner with ya at all times, but like I said it is a real helper for those of us that don't want to miss a thing!

Hope someone gets some use out of this neat idea. I'm almost sure Mercer County isn't the only county out there using todays technology for this purpose.