Challenging budget circumstances and an ongoing urban-rural rift in the Legislature has a state lawmaker renewing calls for local governments to be charged fees for state police coverage if they don’t have a municipal police department.

Proponents say allowing municipalities to rely on state police is unfair to the roughly 75% of the state population who live in communities with local police and pay local taxes to support their municipal police departments. Opponents of previous efforts to enact the state police fee have said the scheme would be too much of a strain on the budgets of often tiny municipalities with little in the way of a local tax base.

House Bill 2284, introduced Thursday by Rep. Justin Fleming, D-Dauphin, would end the practice of using gas tax funds to partially fund state police and create a system for the department to begin billing local governments without municipal police protection. The legislation establishes a sliding scale based on the population of the municipality and whether they offer part-time police protection or none at all.

“Municipalities that establish their own local police departments or join regional police forces would be exempt from the fee,” Fleming said in a memo seeking support for HB 2284. “Importantly, the proposed fees remain significantly below the actual cost of providing PSP services.”

Former Gov. Tom Wolf proposed a similar fee-for-service scheme for state police coverage of local police protection. The plan was derailed by resistance from rural lawmakers.

At the time, state officials estimated that only one-third of the municipalities in Pennsylvania had full-time local police departments. However, because many of those municipalities are small and sparsely-populated, the areas in which state police are the only police protection only accounts for a little more than one-quarter of the state’s population.

In the period from 2001-19, state police picked up the responsibility of providing police protection to 65 more municipalities, Lieutenant Colonel George Bivens, Acting Commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police, said in budget testimony.

As the state police were given more territory to patrol, the number of incidents to which they responded jumped 38%.

In 2025-26, $250 million in gas tax revenue was allocated to state police.

Gov. Josh Shapiro had proposed reducing the amount of gas tax funneled to the state police in his 2025-26 budget proposal as part of a deal in which he also called for increasing the amount of sales tax allocated for mass transit funding. Senate Republicans balked at Shapiro’s mass transit funding proposal, contributing to the budget impasse that wasn’t resolved until mid-November.

In this year’s budget proposal, Shapiro has dropped the push to reduce the amount of gas tax being diverted for state police.

The number of troopers had been capped at 4,310 for more than two decades.