About two months ago Donegal High School was staging a career day, and wanted someone from the newspapers to come for the dog and pony show. I do a pretty mean dog and pony show, so I got the call.

I’d not been to the high school in years. And though I’d been reading about how Donegal is so overcrowded with kids that classes are now held in “modular” classrooms, I was still sort of taken aback when I pulled into the parking lot behind the school and saw the trailers.

Donegal, like so many other school districts in the county, is growing. But perhaps more than any other school district in the county, Donegal taxpayers really really don’t want to cough up more in taxes in order to accommodate those kids.

So it was unsurprising this morning to see a piece in the Intell (unfortunately not online) on how a group of residents - led by a former school board president - is organizing to quash a plan that would spend $100 million to upgrade existing buildings and construct two new schools:

The “timing couldn’t be worse. The economy is terrible,” Spangler said in opposition to the school board proceeding with the feasibility study. “People are losig homes, they’re losign cars, they’re losign jobs. They are not guaranteed raises every year.”

He said the last thing Donegal residents need is a major tax increase.

True enough. The last thing anyone needs is a tax increase.

But here, we bump up against the same dynamic in play with the turnpike lease.

Public institutions require public funding. When the public doesn’t want to furnish the amount of funding those institutions require, what’s the alternative?

The need at Donegal - and every other school district - is only going to increase in the future. If Donegal taxpayers are unable or unwilling to meet that need now - won’t the problems only compound down the line?

In fact, I wrote about this just two years ago, after Donegal has uncovered a “surprise” deficit and had to hike taxes to address it. In part, the deficit was because the school board had budgeted unwisely. But that, in large part, was because Donegal residents are among the most adamant in the county about keeping taxes down.

The U.S. was born in a tax revolt, of course, and the sentiment remains strong across the board. Unfortunately, though, we come now to a time when our public institutions are going to need more of our tax dollars than ever before. It’s either that - or they don’t survive.

So we see, now, the proposed privatization of the Turnpike. How long before we are forced to privatize schools - not because we want to, but because when the citizenry balks at new taxes, there will be no other choice?

We are entering a dangerous era, I fear - a time when, due to the cost of public services and our unwillingness to pay for those services, we will outsource more and more of what once was public to private interests. But we may well wind up unhappy with how those private interests run the show - and what do we do then?

It is not just our aversion to taxes which puts us in this position, it’s the cost of the system itself (the Turnpike Commission being exhibit “A”). If the redundancies or inefficiencies in the system could be eradicated then the costs might be lower; but for political reasons many of the expenses can not be lowered - and so taxpayers must foot a larger bill than they might otherwise have to. Sometimes they simply refuse - as in Donegal. But there are consequences to that - there’s consequences to all of this. In the coming years, I suspect we’re going to learn all about those consequences - the hard way.