HARRISBURG, Pa. – A long simmering controversy over communities that use Pennsylvania police for local protection is beginning to roil amid plans to raid gas taxes to pay for troopers.

The issue has festered for years among city leaders who pay for their own protection, as other suburban and rural communities accept state police assistance with no charge.

“Just because you’re small, doesn’t mean you should get police protection for free,” said Michael Ceci, city manager of Farrell.

It’s not just the small ones, either.

Pennsylvania has no requirement that municipalities, regardless of size, operate police departments. And as urban sprawl turns formerly rural areas into more heavily populated ones, municipalities in many cases haven’t added police, instead relying on troopers to handle the chore.

Hempfield Township, in Westmoreland County, is the most populated municipality in the state, with nearly 42,000 residents, without local police.

It’s the extreme, but it’s not unique. More than 100 boroughs and townships in the state have more than 5,000 residents but no local police.

Larger municipalities represent a fraction of those communities that use state police. About half of the 2,562 municipalities in the state don’t have a local police force.

In population terms, 1 in 5 Pennsylvanians live in a place that relies solely on troopers for protection.

The numbers have been incrementally growing, as cash strapped town leaders ask their cops to tender their badges. Fifteen police departments have closed in the last two years, according to the state police.

And state police are increasingly asked to fill the gaps. There are 4,356 state police troopers. After 184 troopers retired in 2015, the agency is about 360 shy of what would be its full complement, state police spokesman Trooper Adam Reed said. The state police have made no formal analysis of the cost of providing local police service. But at least one estimate puts the price tag at least $300 million.

Ceci knows it’s not easy for small cities to afford police.

Last year, Farrell dropped out of a regional police agreement, having struggled to manage competing expectations about levels of service. Ceci said the problem was communities had different needs and ideas about what officers should do.

Farrell’s city leaders decided they’d be better with their own department. So they resurrected it, spending $1 million a year for 13 officers.

They put up the money even though the city with a population of about 5,000 people struggles financially, and has for decades.

Ceci said that leaves him with little patience for leaders of other communities who quietly avoid making the same type of effort.

“If you don’t value that resource enough to pay for it, why should you have it?” he said.

The matter is particularly irksome for residents of communities such as Farrell, who pay state taxes that help cover the cost of state police protection for those communities that don’t pay.

But Sen. John Wozniak, D-Cambria County, said addressing the cost of state police protection for those communities would be an uphill slog. Rural lawmakers are loathe to tinker with a system that benefits large swathes of their legislative districts, he said.

“People in rural Pennsylvania don’t like to think about how much they depend on the rest of the state to pay for their schools, cover the cost of grandma’s nursing home care, or pay for police protection,” he said.

Pressure to wrestle this bear of an issue is building, however, as the state moves to raid gas taxes to pay for state police, said Gerald Cross, executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League’s Central Division.

He called “default” local police protection by state troopers a form of “corporate welfare on a municipal level.”

The controversy is more focused on larger communities without police, he said, and he doesn’t expect that a rural township with no crime really needs its own police force.

The state’s current budget plan spends about $800 million in gas taxes for state police.

Wozniak said about $500 million of that is justified as the cost of patrolling the highways.

The remainder, he said, is money that should come from elsewhere.

Wozniak said the state should calculate the bill for police protection in order to figure out how much cost to pass along to cities that use the service.

The contrast in police haves and have-nots is stark in Monroe Township, in Snyder County, where about 4,000 residents live without a local police force.

Its population is nearly double that of Shamokin Dam, a borough that Monroe Township almost completely surrounds.

Yet, unlike Monroe Township, Shamokin Dam has a police department.

Its force – three full-time and two part-time officers – costs about $260,000 a year.

Shamokin Dam Mayor Joe McGranaghan said he’s not bothered by other communities that don’t want to spend money on police.

“If their constituents wanted it, I’m sure they’d tell them,” he said.

McGranaghan said there’s little indication of the political will in Harrisburg to take up the issue.

Lawmakers repeatedly propose billing local governments for police protection or withholding gas tax money. “I don’t think any of those bills have ever made it out of committee,” he said.

Dean Davis, chairman of the Monroe Township board of supervisors, bristled at the idea that his community should be forced to create a police department or pay for state police service.

Cities have a broader tax base than his township, Davis said, and they need more policing.

Davis, who has been on the board of supervisors for 16 years, said the township from time to time flirts with the idea of creating a joint police department with neighboring communities. But it’s never pursued it.

“There has never been a time when I felt like we needed (one),” he said.

John Finnerty covers the Pennsylvania Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jfinnerty@cnhi.com.