Anonymous donations can help with things like new museum buildings and emergency relief for natural disasters.
Anonymous donations in such cases are easily understood as altruism. Museums have little to offer in return other than appreciation and tax credit receipts. Helping with one earthquake won't protect you from the next.
Even silence has meaning. Once you write a big check, pose and take a photo, it's only a matter of time before you're asked to write another check.
Donations to the government are different from donations to charities. Charities can safely promise anonymity. Nonprofits need only indicate in their financial disclosures that funds have been received and expended. All you really need to do is justify the source of the money if it comes from a state or federal source.
Donating to the government can raise questions about what you will get in return. Was there an expectation that funding one project would mean that the donor's property would be protected by zoning or that their services would be used for contracting? The real reason to withhold names There are, but some of them are a little sketchy.
But Pennsylvania being Pennsylvania, there always seems to be a way to pull back the curtain of transparency. Anonymous donations are an exception to the state's right-to-know law, as long as they come from individuals rather than businesses, said Melissa Melewski, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania News Media Association.
That's why the Erie Times-News was able to request information about a $100,000 donation to the Erie Police Department in 2019. The donation of new motorcycles to the department was from Erie Insurance. The company issued a statement and the city provided copies of the two checks included in the grant.
The issue comes as the Ligonier Valley Police Commission considers a $2 million police station project for the department that serves Ligonier Township and Ligonier Borough.
The idea of a new station is sound as it is well-located to reduce response times and designed with safety in mind. But the proposal includes an anonymous $1.8 million donation to cover most of the costs.
This is not a museum or hospital facility. This is a law enforcement agency, and people have a right to know who paid for their trip to the police station if they are involved in a non-prosecution case. That doesn't happen with anonymous donations.
Campaign posts are published for a reason. There are reasons why Pennsylvania should have a ban on gifts to state legislators, and why they haven't, despite repeated requests.
Similarly, there should be no right-to-know loopholes that allow individuals to fund the government behind a veil of secrecy.
