For years, it has been the worst-kept secret in Pennsylvania:

Some communities around the commonwealth benefiting from shale gas drilling “impact fees” aren’t using the money to help offset negative “impacts” on the public infrastructure.

Now an audit by Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale concludes that’s exactly what’s been happening and in far too many cases.

In an audit that covered the years 2012-16, DePasquale’s staff found that a quarter of the money in 30 counties and municipalities sampled was spent on “questionable costs.”

Among those “questionable” expenditures — building swimming pools, a portable boat dock, a playground, inflatable party rentals, entertainment, buying fireworks for community celebrations, balancing budget deficits and paying county jail salaries.

But DePasquale says the blame for these questionable expenditures must be shared with the Pennsylvania Legislature. Act 13 of 2012 is too vague, he says, and there’s no mechanism to monitor that spending.

Indeed, and as legislative Republicans note, Act 13 was intended to be vague to promote local control of those “impact” dollars. But if the intent of the law was to help local jurisdictions mitigate the public costs associated with shale gas drilling operations, that intent should be honored and the law should be strengthened to reflect just that.

DePasquale also suggested that either the state Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) or the state Commonwealth Financing Authority (CFA) be tapped to oversee “impact fee” spending.

That hardly instills confidence in the process. The DCED has a long track record of poor oversight. And the CFA has a long history of poor accountability in its own right.

The better tack would be for the Legislature to establish better guidelines for spending these shale drilling receipts with far less wiggle room and have the auditor general keep bird-dogging that spending while publicly calling out abuses.

The quote of the week has to come from U.S. Steel CEO Mario Longhi, appearing Wednesday on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” program.

In a larger conversation about what’s ahead for the iconic steelmaker, Longhi addressed onerous government regulation:

“When you get into some situations where we’re being asked to control some substances in water that are far lower than what nature naturally offers, that’s irrational,” he said.

“There was a point in time in the past couple years that I was having to hire more lawyers to try to interpret these new regulations than I was hiring … engineers. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Longhi says what most commonsense people believe — regulation has role to play but it “has to be done smartly.”

Too many regulations, environmental and financial, don’t pass the “smart” test. Here’s to the new presidential administration restoring intelligence to the equation.

Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).