Prescribing a “crash diet” to 39 people you have never met will make some healthier, make others sick and will kill a handful. Doctors don’t prescribe in this way, for obvious reasons. Instead, they base their recommendations on detailed individual histories and a strong understanding of the symptoms. They know who they’re dealing with, they see what’s wrong and they follow the best practices for fixing the problem.

Everyone knows that Rhode Island’s economy is not well. Recently, we have seen signs of courageous and incisive state and municipal leadership, for instance, on education and pension reform. However, when it comes to overall state funding policy, many elected officials — including the governor — are still prescribing a blanket crash diet for Rhode Island’s 39 cities and towns. This is not a way to lead our state back to fiscal health.

Rhode Island’s 39 municipalities have dramatically different fiscal profiles. Only by taking a detailed history can we understand how they got this way and how we might go about fixing it. A history of poor fiscal management in some of our municipalities has resulted in wild deviations between similar communities: Some have lifetime Blue Cross insurance for teachers and their spouses while others do not; some have as much as 50 percent more police officers per capita than others; some have millions of dollars more in pension liabilities than others. Binding arbitration, including the proposed teacher-contract legislation, is an example of state policy that will continue to widen the gap between efficient and inefficient communities.

These inequities were arguably brought on by the cities and towns themselves or have been the result of wayward binding-arbitration decisions, which favored labor unions. But the state is not blameless, in that it has, for decades, failed to incentivize good fiscal behavior — indeed, it has often done just the opposite. And in other important respects, gross fiscal inequities have been created between similar cities and towns by poor state policy dating back several decades. Three attributes mark good governmental funding policy at any level: 1) The funding is equitable; 2) it’s transparent; and 3) it rewards the right kinds of behavior. Our current state funding policies bear none of these hallmarks.

Anyone who feels compelled to weigh in on the issue of state funding to cities and towns should at the very least have a fundamental understanding of each community’s budget and should be well versed in the two major funding policies that determine how 75 percent of the shrinking pot of state aid, millions less than the often reported $1.1 billion, is distributed.

Many taxpayers could not name these two funding sources. They are the education funding policy, which distributes $700 million to school districts, and the “vehicle-excise phase out” funding policy, which allocates $140 million to municipalities. More troubling, most local and state elected officials as well as the media would not be able to explain how these funding programs work: that is, what rules govern the distribution of funding to Rhode Island’s cities and towns.

Efforts to regionalize municipal services will be much more effective if these two funding policies are reformed. Every Rhode Islander should adopt the slogan, “My student is my student! My car is my car!” State funding for education to any municipality should be based on the actual students in its district schools. State aid in a vehicle tax program should be based on the assessed value of the cars owned by the citizens of a city or town.

Believe it or not, this is not how it works in Rhode Island. As a result, we have inequitable distributions of revenue to cities and towns, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars going to the wrong places.

Consider this: A main reason that Rhode Island is one of the highest spending and lowest performing states in the nation on education is because we fail, time and again, to get the right amount of money to the right places at the right time.

A strong education funding policy would be based on individual student need, establishing the base level of state support every student requires and providing additional support through an equitable and transparent formula for special needs that require costly additional services.

This measurable amount of funding would follow a child to any Rhode Island public school parents choose. Only in this way can we get taxpayers’ dollars where they were intended to go. Only in this way can we avoid the practically comic system under which we now live, where a district can continue to receive tens of millions of dollars for thousands of students who no longer attend its schools or, in many cases, even live in the district, while another district can face an influx of costly students and not receive one additional dime in state aid. Only in this way can the state stop providing fiscal incentives for bad results like high dropout rates.

Likewise, an intelligent vehicle tax policy would be based on one state vehicle tax rate. State policy aside, a 2004 Ford Explorer parked in a driveway in Barrington is worth the same amount of money as when it is parked in a driveway in Warwick. Currently the state allocates funding to communities based on vehicle tax rates, frozen in 1998, rewarding communities with the highest tax rates and penalizing communities with the lowest tax rates. Depending on where the Explorer is registered, cities and towns can receive checks as low as $59 or as high as $460. Some may call this policy property-tax relief, but no one can defend it as fair tax relief.

That this has to be explained reveals what a mess the State of Rhode Island has gotten itself into.

This is not about pitting one community against another. As municipal leaders we are ready to live with a state system that is fair and well thought out. That system would aid us on the basis of who we, as communities, really are, rather than on who we were a quarter of a century ago.

Fair and well thought out. That’s the best medicine. Prescribe it to us and we’ll take it, and live with it and make it work.

Daniel J. McKee is mayor of Cumberland, writing for a coalition of elected officials supporting funding-policy reform that includes: Lincoln Town Administrator T. Joseph Almond, Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian, Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline, Pawtucket Mayor James E. Doyle, Smithfield Town Manager Dennis G. Finlay, Cranston Mayor Allan W. Fung, Tiverton Town Administrator James Goncalco, North Smithfield Town Administrator Paulette D. Hamilton, Westerly Town Manager Steven T. Hartford, East Greenwich Town Council President Michael B. Isaacs, North Providence Mayor Charles A. Lombardi, Central Falls Mayor Charles D. Moreau and Johnston Mayor Joseph M. Polisena.