Article 82. Consolidation of City Governments or Urban Secession? Or Is this the Right Question?
Its all about how to provide better services to urban dwellers with the most efficiency. Most large cities do not provide adequate crime prevention and protection to their city residents fueling the desire for some communities to secede. At the same time there are movements to combine city governments so that services such as fire and police can gain economy of scale. Whether to combine or to secede depends largely on local conditions such as tax bases and economies. Which brings up a third possibility “Government Reform” by allowing local ward committees to manage some local services. And a fourth possibility is for city governments to gain the economies of scale they desire through reciprocal agreements with other cities to share city services.
By not asking the right questions cities and suburban communities can find themselves with even greater problems than they have now. For example an urban community that wishes to secede from a greater metropolitan city to gain local control of its services will need to know if they have enough of a tax base to provide those services. IF they don’t then they should pursue the third option to gain local control of some services provided to their community. In other words the metropolitan government should be reformed by allowing decisions on local services to be made at the local level. This is the same Japanese management principle that I have recommended elsewhere to make bureaucracies more responsive by “driving down the decision making power to the lowest level of effectiveness”. This type of arrangement works well where inner city crime is high. and local control can be established by blocking off through streets and in forming gated communities. These communities should have their own police station. The goal here is to establish a “Sense of Community” which I would define as when a majority of the community knows if someone either lives in the community or is an outsider. In Article 53. I recommended that this method be used to drive crime out of a major metropolitan area by establishing small communities one at a time. Each community would need a micro economy to make it sustainable.
It is to the advantage of some more affluent suburban cities to annex a neighboring depressed city. Especially those that prevent it from growing through expansion. I have discussed this in more detail in Article 80.
For a more lengthy discussion on Consolidation of Government see Governing Magazine click on management Insights and Consolidation: Consolidation of Public Services from Government Innovators Network Harvard JFK school of Government.
“The consolidation of public services at the local, state, and federal level is a hotly debated topic. This page offers resources on innovative and recent examples of consolidation in addition to relevant writings on this subject from the Kennedy School of Government and our partners. Topics of interest include: school district consolidation, city-county consolidation, amalgamation, regionalism, centralization, fragmentation, tax-sharing, cost-sharing agreements, shared services, service integration, economies of scale, and diseconomies of scale.”
The following articles are from Management Consulting Forum.
Article 42. Declaring War on Bureaucratic Complexity
Article 53. Developing A “Sense of Community” and Micro Economies in Depressed Areas.
Article 80. How to breathe new Life into Contiguous Depressed City Suburbs
