Cities and Counties Find Common Cause

posted by Alan Greenblatt

Fans of regionalism and metro cooperation will want to read a column that William Stafford has up on Citiwire.net. Stafford is president of the Trade Development of Great Seattle, an affiliate of the area chamber of commerce.

Thomas Cochran, veteran executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, says Americans should focus less on the Gross Domestic Product measure, more on the Gross Metro Product (GMP) of our regions. The New York region’s total — $1.2 trillion dollars — is larger than India’s. The combined output of the “top 10″ U.S. metros, he notes, is greater than that of 37 states.

While we’re legally a nation of states, says Cochran, “our economy functions as a conglomeration of metro areas” — a fact that federal policies “do not yet acknowledge.”

Cochran talks of a new political alignment: “I have large counties,” he told a recent “Meeting of the Minds” conference in New York, “calling me and saying we’d like to join the Conference of Mayors. We ‘got to get down’ and do the politics, form a political operation to demand” more responsive federal policies. “I’m going to start talking to urban county leaders,” he asserts.

The Most Powerful City in the United States

posted by Josh Goodman

It's Omaha, Nebraska. No, Omaha hasn't supplanted New York City as the world's financial center, nor displaced Washington, D.C., as our capital.

But NYC and D.C. can only wish (and do wish) to have the same power over their suburbs that Omaha possesses over its own. That's one thing I discovered when writing a feature on commuter taxes and annexation for the April issue of Governing.

Omaha recently completed an annexation that a couple of experts told me might not be possible anywhere else in the country. The city gobbled up Elkhorn (population 8,200).

Elkhorn was an incorporated town and, in most states, two incorporated municipalities can only combine through a consolidation approved by both of them. Elkhorn didn't want to join Omaha. However, under Nebraska law Omaha can annex an incorporated town without its consent, so long as the town's population is less than 10,000.

That rule prompted Elkhorn to pursue a fruitless quest to engage in annexations of its own to boost its population over the 10,000 threshold (way to sacrifice the moral high ground, Elkhorn!). In March, the non-consensual consolidation became reality.

Omaha's tax powers are just as unusual. Last year, the city extended its car registration fee to some surrounding unincorporated areas. This revenue didn't go to a regional taxing authority, but rather straight to Omaha's coffers. Nor is any of it being returned to the areas outside city limits. And Omaha didn't start providing any services to these places either.

In other words, the city simply started taxing people outside of its jurisdiction, people who hadn't voted for any of its elected leaders. State law simply says that the tax can't apply to anyone who drives fewer than 30 days a year in the city. For now, Omaha is using its power magnanimously, allowing anyone to fill out a form and opt out.

That fact might provide little solace for folks in these unincorporated areas. If they need a silver lining, this will have to do: They'll be annexed soon.

Too Many Conductors Ruin the Trains?

posted by Josh Goodman

Have you every thought about who's in charge of intercity train service in the United States? Hopefully not, because if you did, you'd probably end up with a headache.

Take the Capitol Corridor, which runs from Sacramento to Oakland to San Jose.

-Union Pacific, a private company, owns almost all of the tracks and operates freight trains on the corridor.

-Under California law, the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA), a coalition of six local transit agencies, is in charge of passenger service on the route. These six agencies represent a total of eight counties, which each get to have two members on CCJPA's board.

-Since 1999, CCJPA has selected one of those six transit agencies, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), to manage the service.

-But BART doesn't actually operate the trains. The CCJPA has hired Amtrak, everyone's least favorite quasi-federal entity, to do that job.

-The California Department of Transportation (CALTRANS), which managed the line until 1998, still provides funding.

-Ombudsman and oversight responsibilities are handled by an independent commission consisting of James Baker, Lindsay Lohan, the Dalai Lama, Mr. T and Tai Shan.

Ok, so that last one is just a rumor. Nonetheless, this is a pretty complicated way to manage your train service.

So Much for Savings

posted by Alan Greenblatt

Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson has put forward a crime-fighting plan that he says will cost an additional $85 million per year. Putting aside the merits of the plan, it offers further evidence that promises of savings through regionalism are usually overblown.

Indianapolis has long been considered a leader in regionalism efforts and Peterson has been attempting to integrate more services. In particular, he argued that city and county law enforcement should be combined. When he made this pitch in 2005, he said the combination would result in a savings of $35 million.

The savings, in fact, became controversial (4th item), with opponents wondering whether fewer dollars would mean diminished services. But Peterson prevailed last year, and the police and sheriff merged at the start of the year.

Not all of his new proposal goes directly to crime-fighting efforts. There's money for courts and pensions. For all I know, not having studied it, it may be a genius-level blueprint. The total cost, including interest, could be $1.3 billion over 25 years.

That does show, less than two weeks after the local law enforcement departments combined, the notion of saving money is already off the table.

Okay, We'll Bite

posted by Alan Greenblatt

We've gotten emails from the office of Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, encouraging us to give more coverage to the city-county police merger set to happen there on the first of the year.

So how can we resist linking to this Indianapolis Star story, noting that at the first of more than half a dozen public information meetings the city is holding about the merger, only one person showed up?

If it's drawing that kind of interest at home, I guess they do have a point about the need to trumpet this news to a national audience.

Worth Emphasizing

posted by Alan Greenblatt

Otis White, over on our "Urban Notebook" page, makes a point about units of local government in St. Louis that is worth highlighting:

"St. Louis has the second-highest ratio of local governments to citizens (31.7 per 100,000 population, second only to Pittsburgh). Your assumption: People must pay a lot for all these governments. Nope. St. Louis is fourth from the bottom for the percentage of total personal income claimed by local government."

That's significant, because one of the arguments you'll always hear made by proponents of regionalism is that merging services or agencies will save money. It can be done where there are duplicative services. But promises of monetary savings are usually overblown.

That doesn't mean there aren't other good reasons to combine governments, such as efficiency or making the lines of decision-making more clear.

Maybe They'll Cut Their Conference Fees

posted by Alan Greenblatt

I'm not in the habit of posting press releases, but thought this was interesting news for this audience:

Philadelphia, PA, December 5, 2006: The Alliance for Regional Stewardship (ARS) announced today that it has been awarded a $1 million challenge grant to further its growth and development as the nation’s only public-private organization dedicated to building strong regions. The grant was made by Becky and Jim Morgan of Los Altos Hills, CA.

Becky Morgan, a former elected County Supervisor and State Senator in California, and former CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, was a co-founder of ARS in 2000. Her husband Jim Morgan is Chairman of Applied Materials, Inc., a Fortune 150 supplier of products and services to the semiconductor industry, headquartered in Santa Clara, CA.

Why Reporters Love Regionalism

posted by Alan Greenblatt

The Des Moines Register yesterday reprinted an article I wrote for Governing a few months ago about collaboration among local governments in Iowa.

That's not exactly the zippiest topic -- even for Governing -- so I shared my surprise with Rox Laird, one of the Register's editors, that they were interested in reprinting the story. Laird noted that the paper had editorialized in favor of the abortive attempt to merge the Des Moines and Polk County governments and so had an abiding interest in the topic.

It's not entirely surprising that a newspaper would take a strong stand in favor of regionalism efforts. Some papers will pick apart talk of merger or consolidation, wondering whose ox will be gored if the promised savings ("we'll spend $35 million less on police services!") were actually to occur.

In general, though, newspapers are among the leading cheerleaders for (often doomed) regionalism discussions. The Courier-Journal, for instance, provided a major platform promoting the Louisville-Jefferson County merger. But why are journalists enthralled with regionalism?

Give Me Regionalism, or Give Me Death

posted by Alan Greenblatt

Dan Walters, the longtime Sacramento Bee columnist, opens a piece about sheriffs with a sentence that NACo's going to love:

"A strong argument could be made for the abolition of counties as an anachronistic and irrelevant form of government and their replacement by multipurpose regional governments and/or expanded cities."

Reports from All Over

posted by Alan Greenblatt

Initiatives to take redistricting out of the grubby hands of legislators failed in both California and Ohio this past November, but because redistricting is seen by many as a source of both heightened partisanship and decreased electoral competition, reformers continue to push for change.

That's certainly the case in California, where Democratic legislative leaders have stated that they want to work out a new system for redistricting, even in the wake of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's failed plan. The state's bipartisan gerrymander is one of the worst/most effective in the country. None of the 153 legislative or congressional seats changed partisan hands in 2004.

A California redistricting study -- and a bonus report on regionalism! -- after the jump.