The Smallest Towns Are The Most Corrupt

My first real job was for a firm that had a contract to provide legal services for CIRSA, a self-insurance pool for local governments in Colorado that like an ordinary insurance company hired law firms to serve as insurance defense counsel for member governments facing covered litigation. 

It was our experience that the smaller and more rural the government was, the less competently it was run, with the most outrageous cases of misconduct and mismanagement we had to litigate consistently coming from the local governments with the smallest population. This was because these governments had the least qualified people have to serve as politicians because no one else is available and because, even per capita, more qualified people for this kind of work tended to migrate to bigger cities. 

Competence and lack of corruption go hand in hand, and the reverse is also true. 

[T]he small town of Corsica, in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, was compelled to double its property tax rate. According to this story, the town did so because the town secretary embezzled so much money over a eight-year period that the town was unable to maintain a children’s playground or fix its deteriorating roads. The town went so far as to borrow money from its mayor so that its government did not shut down. The scale of the embezzlement is evident from two facts. The town secretary stole $306,000. There are 319 people living in the town. After being caught and indicted, the embezzler repaid about $41,000 of the embezzled funds. . . . 

She issued checks from the town’s bank account and from the state’s Local Government investment Trust to herself, her husband, and her father. To do this, she forged the name of the vice-president of the town’s council. She also made electronic transfer payments from town accounts. She used that money to pay bills. She used the town’s account at a store to purchase a camera, an iPad, and other things for herself. To hide this activity, she prepared and submitted false bank records to the town council and to state auditors.

Rejecting a request for probation, the judge sentenced her to 21 months of prison and also ordered her to repay the other $265,000 that she had embezzled. Though the secretary, her lawyer, family members, and friends cited health problems in asking for probation, the judge concluded that the secretary’s actions were motivated by greed and that a prison sentence was consistent with the sentences handed down to other embezzlers. Perhaps the judge was also influenced by the fact that after being indicted and released on bond, the secretary was arrested on multiple counts of retail theft for five separate incidents at another retail store.

From Mauled Again.