Bruce Katz

Ending local fragmentation

Vice President, Founder of Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, Apr 21, 10.

Amid recent calls that government needs to be put in the hands of the states, people seem to be forgetting that many state governments are bordering on dysfunctional. Albany is a national laughing stock. California has given new meaning to the term “ungovernable.” Governors Sanford, Blagojevich and Paterson are late-night talk show punch lines.
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States are super-powered by and dependent on powerful metropolitan economies, which are the nation’s hubs of trade and commerce and centers of talent and innovation. Yet these same metropolitan areas are ruled by a hodgepodge of cities, counties, towns, villages, school boards, fire districts, library districts, workforce boards, industrial development authorities, water and sewer districts and a host of other special entities. America has a fragmented system of government more suited to the localism of the 18th century than the globalism of the 21st.

Pennsylvania, for example, has 3,133 local governments, including 67 counties, 56 cities, 1,547 townships and 501 school districts.

The result in most states is a fundamental mismatch between the real metro-scaled economy of innovative firms, risk-taking entrepreneurs and talented workers, and the inefficient administrative geography of government. The economic, fiscal, environmental and social price of this fragmentation is too high to bear any more.

The good news is that change is already happening. An unintended legacy of the Great Recession may be the most significant government restructuring in the United States since the modernization effort of the 1930s.
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There are benefits associated with intense localism. Citizens feel a closer connection to their local officials (although does anyone really know the boundaries of their local library district?). And, in theory, individuals and firms can shop around for the government that most closely matches their preferred mix of efficiency, service and taxes.

Yet the drawbacks of fragmented governance far outweigh the benefits.

Fragmentation keeps government weak. With the landscape chopped into thousands of municipalities and special bodies, most local governments remain tiny, nearly amateur concerns, unequal to the widening challenges of global competition, suburbanization, revitalization and economic development.

Full story: The Metro Moment
Source: The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2010

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