You don't have to be the city of Pittsburgh to make news with a balance sheet that doesn't want to balance. In fact, four-fifths of 509 cities, boroughs and townships in the region either had or were facing a budget deficit between 2000 and 2005.

What's worse is almost 60 percent of the municipalities have been there at least twice, and almost half saw the growth in overall expenses outpace that of revenues in the period. That's the portrait of fiscal distress in 10 southwestern Pennsylvania counties in a study directed by George Dougherty, a professor in Pitt's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, in cooperation with the Pittsburgh Regional Indicator project.

The fact that so many municipalities -- large and small, urban and suburban -- either end their budget with red ink or have to perform extra steps to avoid it is a reason for consolidating Pennsylvania's fractured units of government or using joint contracts to provide costly services like police protection.

Pennsylvania has 766 municipalities, 30 percent of the total, with populations under 1,000 -- hardly enough to fund a local government with reliability. Too many residents of struggling towns and hamlets, out of pride or history, insist on going it alone.

But deficits are nothing to be proud of and cutting services can be fatal to a town's history. It's time for Pennsylvanians to reshape their municipalities in a way to make them financially sustainable.