Consolidating Developmental Local Government

Documents the dynamics of local government transformation and captures the key themes of the debates about policy options, lessons and key strategic decisions. This text is suitable for government officials, students, researchers, specialists, community leaders, businesses and the general reader.

City-country consolidation builds upon the Progressive tradition of favoring structural reform of local governments. This volume looks at some important issues confronting contemporary efforts to consolidate governments and develops a theoretical approach to understanding both the motivations for pursuing consolidation and the way the rules guiding the process shape the outcome. Individual chapters consider the push for city-county consolidation and the current context in which such decisions are debated, along with several alternatives to city-county consolidation. The transaction costs of city-county consolidation are compared against the costs of municipal annexation, inter-local agreements, and the use of special district governments to achieve the desired consolidation of services. The final chapters compare competing perspectives for and against consolidation and put together some of the pieces of an explanatory theory of local government consolidation.

Although a frequently discussed reform, campaigns to merge a major municipality and county to form a unified government fail to win voter approval eighty per cent of the time. One cause for the low success rate may be that little systematic analysis of consolidated governments has been done. In City–County Consolidation, Suzanne Leland and Kurt Thurmaier compare nine city–county consolidations—incorporating data from 10 years before and after each consolidation—to similar cities and counties that did not consolidate. Their groundbreaking study offers valuable insight into whether consolidation meets those promises made to voters to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of these governments. The book will appeal to those with an interest in urban affairs, economic development, local government management, general public administration, and scholars of policy, political science, sociology, and geography.

This book addresses two issues related to the structure of local government: the determinants of consolidation and the potential impact of consolidation on local government spending. This is a narrow undertaking and leaves important elements of local government reform for future analysis. The study's primary foci are examining the factors that influence city-county consolidation, considering the impact of city-county consolidation on local government spending, and estimating the potential savings that could result from the scale economies and efficiency gains from consolidating local government units. While other regions of the United States are considered in this study, but the analysis focuses primarily on the Midwest where population declines and changes in the employment base and state policies (such as property tax caps in Indiana) have had dramatic effects on the fiscal viability of local governments. The current economic climate, along with policy changes related to property tax restructuring in many states, has led to substantial reductions in local governments' budgets. As a result, many local governments are in crisis and are considering some level of consolidation. Statistical methods and data on consolidation referendum attempts in the United States since 1970 are used to test whether governments that have consolidated (i.e., voters approved the consolidation referendum) had higher spending prior to their consolidation (as measured by local government employment rates, payrolls, and expenditures) compared to the average local government in the state. The effects of city-county consolidation are explored; using consolidation referendum data, the impact of consolidation on local government employment rates, payrolls, and expenditures is examined. The influence of consolidation on economic development is also investigated with some interesting results. The study also used two methods to estimate the savings from government consolidation and presents aggregate models to examine the potential savings from economies of scale and efficiency improvements. The book also helpfully provides a helpful discussion of the economies of scale and efficiency for several functional areas, including police and fire protection, sewerage, solid waste, public welfare, administration, health, education, and libraries. This book will be an essential resource for political scientists and policy makers interested in American government. Written in a highly accessible manner, it will also be a valuable read for students and general readers.

This book concerns the role of the state in achieving development. In many developing countries conventional wisdom concluded that development is best achieved through a centralised development strategy. The failure of this centralised development strategy has brought about the emergence of decentralisation to local government as one of the means to turn the tide of underdevelopment. This book presents decentralisation not only as a manifestation of 'good governance', but also as an indispensable tool towards development. The central question, however, is the following: how should the transitional state convert this into constitutional and legal arrangements? The author proposes a model for capturing the developmental role of local government in institutional arrangements. The new design for local government, put forward in South Africas 1997 Constitution, is based on the notion that local government should be the epicentre of development. This has prompted the author to use this South African concept as well as the first experiences with the implementation of the new local government dispensation as a case study.The importance of the book thus lies in the fact that it produces an institutional model for developmental local government that is not only based on development and decentralisation theories but is also tested in practice. It is hoped that those with an interest in the role of the state in development will find the arguments and conclusions useful. The book also provides a comprehensive overview of the South African design for local government, which is of interest to lawyers, policy makers and other parties involved in the implementation of the South African decentralisation strategy. Jaap de Visser teaches public law at the Law Faculty of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Until the end of 2002, he worked as a researcher for the Community Law Centre (University of the Western Cape), specialising in local government law.