Frank Lucchino knows dropping the term “voluntary municipal disincorporation” doesn’t exactly make him the life of the party.

“Eyes tend to glaze over,” he said.

The former Allegheny County controller long studied the concept of disbanding financially distressed municipalities and turning responsibility for them over to county government. In 1994, he wrote an entire report about the topic called “Reclaiming Hope.”

…

In a 2015 report for the Widener Law Journal, Michelle Wilde Anderson, a professor at Stanford Law School, said dissolution should be among the “list of tools available to struggling municipalities” so long as their territory is merged into that of another elected government.

“As I have found in previous research, counties are no panacea when it comes to the management of concentrated poverty, but at least they are democratic bodies subject to some level of public accountability. …

“If the Legislature wishes to add a meaningful dissolution law to the toolkit for troubled cities, as it should do, state legislators should go back to the drawing board — the one that Frank Lucchino drafted for them years ago.”