Politics,Opportunity,and Leadership

Abstract

Keywords

consolidation local government local politics

This issue of the State and Local Government Review’s Governance Matters section features an article by Amy Uden that is aimed at helping those faced with the tricky prospect of consolidating local services, functions, or jurisdictions think through the value and efficiency premises behind such choices. On the one hand, as the article suggests, those contemplating such changes in local governments may undertake them for political, social, or operating motives ranging from equity to efficiency. On the other hand, no matter what motivates such attempts, failure to fully consider the probability of achieving or even moving toward the goal, given current circumstances, structures, and statutes, is likely to lead to failure in the endeavor itself. To help think this through, the article offers a checklist of important factors that cut across situations and can be scored in a way to suggest what actions might be most successful.

As the Uden article posits, successful consolidation ventures are the outcome of the interplay of various elements. At the outset, it is never clear whether gains or improvements demonstrated through analysis can trump difficult legal processes or political opposition to consolidation. At least two factors enter into the decision to take any action on consolidating at all. One is the degree to which a decision to take action is motivated by a perceived gain in political power for an individual or group. The other is the degree to which it is based on a perceived operating benefit—the product of rational analysis about how to make things run better in local government. No matter what the purported advantages, environmental contingencies may well condition whether such decisions to consolidate are likely to be undertaken or bear fruit. For example, a loud and cohesive demand for change or reform in general or political or legal resistance based on fear of change or loss of autonomy that can be overcome by appealing arguments about resulting costs and benefits.

In state and local government administration, such determinations are made by actors ranging from elected officials to planners, operators, and managers who have practical day-to-day responsibility for formulating policy, carrying it out, and evaluating its outcomes. Accordingly, it seemed fitting to consult individuals in practice and with experience in consolidation for their views about both the article and the topic. For this issue, three commentators were selected. All three have positions in local government, or with entities concerned with local government, and have professional experience in consolidation of services and jurisdictions in local government. The three commentators are:

Jeff Downes, City Manager of Vestavia Hills, Alabama

Mr. Downes heads up a city of about 35,000, a suburb of Birmingham, that sits in Shelby County, Alabama. Also, he was the appointed deputy mayor in Montgomery, Alabama, for twenty-six years.

Laura Mathis, Deputy Director, Middle Georgia Regional Commission

Ms. Mathis is located in Macon Georgia in a regional agency that delivers planning and development services for about twenty cities and ten counties in middle Georgia. She has worked on consolidation and unification issues with them currently and in the past.

Thomas Owen Councilman, District 8, Metro Council, Louisville, Kentucky

Mr. Owen is an elected official in the Louisville Metro government, a consolidated government that includes the former city of Louisville and former Jefferson County in a mostly unified jurisdiction. He also teaches at the University of Louisville.

These three experts were asked to read the article and to offer their views on the article and the topic in a round table discussion held by teleconference. They raised several important issues that are both supportive of the Uden article and that may serve as extension of and counterpoint to it. The following is an analysis and summary of their discussion in digest form.

Comments on the Uden Article

All three commentators found considerable value in the Uden article. They were especially impressed by the explanation of fragmentation and of consolidation actions as a way to address it. The experts mentioned particular interest in certain parts of the checklist and framework and suggested further study or extension. As Jeff Downes stated,

What this article lays out is a set of logical arguments as to why there is fragmentation in government, why there’s lack of efficiency and effectiveness when you have that fragmentation, and it talks about all of the logical reasons for consolidation … Overall I think the article does a fabulous job for laying out the basics, the framework, setting up the tone for the conversation. I do think that it could have great … follow up on … items seven [demographic context] and eight [catalyzing conditions] on the checklist and [to] see if there are some lessons to be learned in deeper fashion ….

Laura Mathis concurred about the general usefulness of the article and framework. She found that it reflected her experience many ways:

The article does a great job of, from what I’ve seen, in working with urban local governments as well as rural local governments, addressing or identifying what the issues are that tend to lead people to consolidation. [E]fficiency in government and transparency in taxation … tend to be issues that drive people to a consolidation conversation and I think the article does a good job of spelling those out.

Nevertheless, although she found the cases and the checklist based on them useful, Ms. Mathis expressed some skepticism about rational analysis of the issues involved in consolidation:

I think the case studies … in a better way get to … those factors that went into … a successful … effort … [S]he tries to cull … down to those core factors about consolidation that … leads to the checklist and I don’t know that you could ever have a checklist … capture all of those different nuances. She … does capture the big ones. It’s just that the devil is in the details.

Likewise, Tom Owen found the piece of value in thinking through the dynamics of consolidation. He applauded the article for development of an instrument and viewed that as most useful for staff in the analysis of consolidation issues. He agreed with the author that complete consolidation was often held up as a desirable and achievable goal, but opined that, even when successful, reality was messier:

I think it might be staff that are going to take the article and use the rating system to determine which level of cooperation is desirable. I think it’s also important that the author acknowledges that the default position among wonks is that somehow or another merger, complete merger, is the default position. It’s desirable, it’s progressive, it’s the wave of the future and so as a result she works at providing gradations of cooperation from weak to strong to ultimate consolidation …. [B]ut frankly, any community that we say has a merged government, once you start peeling back the layers, you realize that a complete top to bottom merger or consolidation seldom occurs …. It is … a noble effort, to look at these issues as rationally as possible … and … with her “fit” section, she tries to help a jurisdiction or someone looking at this issue … determine the likelihood of success …. [W]ith her examples early in the article she makes it pretty clear that a fuller consolidation doesn’t succeed very often … I think she tries as best possible to think categorically about these dynamics … and how to go about it.

Politics and Rationality

Nevertheless, while considering the ideas behind a rational analysis of consolidation, not unexpectedly, the expert panel spent considerable time discussing the impingement of political and related background circumstances. These ranged from the task of political persuasion and employing rational analysis to convince citizens to back consolidation efforts to the underlying political dynamics of power, race, and cultural identity.

Laura Mathis seemed to see the task of convincement as the intersection of rational reasons and political ends. She indicated that often what counts as a rational reason for consolidation-driven change is conditioned by both the expectations and the knowledge of citizens. These arguments have to add value beyond normal citizen expectations:

What I’ve found is that you need to have a compelling, why? [W]hy are you asking people to go through this process, which is difficult and messy and challenging, and what do you hope to gain from it? That’s usually the question that most people ask … I joked one time with an elected official who … wanted to do an annexation effort, “… [W]hen you knock on my door and tell me you want to annex my property what are you going to tell me?” … [H]e said, “efficiency in government …” [I said], “I don’t care, I expect you to be efficient already. So what. What else am I going to get for giving you my tax dollars?”

Moreover, she offered that to be successful, persuasion efforts need not only inform citizens about the desirable but educate them about the actual and the possible:

… [A]s people get into the discussion of the practical—what’s the structure, how many elected officials, who’s the chief law enforcement officer, do you have a strong mayor, what’s the form of government?—[W]hat I have experienced is you do a lot of … “Local Government 101” … explaining to citizens how local government works from a practical standpoint. You know, why would consolidation change revenue streams, why would consolidation change this? But you have to start with what’s reality today and help them see … what’s possible … [Often], they want guarantees that … taxes aren’t going to go up … nothing is going to change. [Yet], practically every time a budget comes up for a vote and a millage rate gets set you have no guarantee that it is going to stay the same. But … you don’t really want to hear that, so going through a consolidation discussion raises all those things that on a day-in day-out basis citizens don’t really consider.

In addition, consolidation efforts must take into account the resistance to rationality that is presented by history and entrenched ways of doing things. Sometimes, practical gains are not enough to overcome attitudes. As Laura Mathis indicated,

[T]here are all those power, authority, history, heritage … issues [that] come to the surface … it comes down to the same issues regardless of whether you’re a small or a large government in terms of why you would do sorts things and then it’s a matter of can you overcome those dynamics or hurdles of power, authority, history. [I]n Macon-Bibb County, which consolidated on January 1, 2014, [there] was a small town called Payne City. [I]n Georgia every jurisdiction has to pass a consolidation vote and the consolidation vote failed in Payne City 9 to 7: 9 votes against; 7 votes for. [Payne City] is an old mill village and that heritage, their identity as an historic mill village they really did not want to lose. They ended up consolidating the following year in the legislature, (they realized they could not survive on their own), even though the voters had not approved it. That’s a real example of how, even though it was perfectly irrational for them to try and continue, and their citizens would have better service, it was preserving and protecting their identity as Payne City that was really important to them.

Jeff Downes had a frank comment concerning consolidation-oriented change. Even clear gains can be difficult to present in a convincing manner in particular climates. In talking about history and race in Alabama, he said:

[I]n the political world of Alabama, throw out logic, okay? Because it’s all about power, it’s about authority, and it’s about history. In the deep south there have been racial divisions from years past and in essence you have a power evolution in local government in the largest of the municipalities over the course of … the 1970s through the present time, with Birmingham being the largest municipality in Alabama to be led by an African American majority. [S]o the ability to … make a logical argument as to why the predominately white suburbs ought to then consolidate with the primarily African American, Jefferson County … is basically the elephant in the room. [I]t’s hard to even open the conversation … when you have that history.

Like the other panelists, Tom Owen endorsed rationality as an approach but saw it as often superseded by politics:

As far as the checklist is concerned, I would say, rationality, when it comes to discussion of this topic, which is highly volatile, always, I think any rationality is welcome. Frankly, I have a hard time imagining that … elected members representing different jurisdictions … are going to sit in a room and quietly think rationally about this topic.

He was not sure that a rational analysis could get at political factors, particularly what might be termed sentiments. In the case of Louisville, he pointed to one sentiment in particular—shame:

I think … this checklist cannot get at … political dynamics. In [the Louisville] case, shame was a major factor. We had tried consolidation of some kind with two referenda in the 1980s that had failed, but on the other hand, two of our nearby rival cities, the second largest city in Kentucky, Lexington … [and], just 100 miles north, Indianapolis had a consolidated government. [S]o in 2000 we began accusing ourselves again of being backward. So, shame is a factor in our successful consolidation. Shame is major factor.

In the same vein, Mr. Owen indicated that even outcomes that looked like complete success in consolidation may not be as far reaching or may be less comprehensive than they appear on their face:

But … when we say merged, or consolidated … in Jefferson County there remain eighty-three [separate] suburban governments, eighty-three, and some are as big as a sub-division and some have twenty or twenty-five or thirty-five thousand residents. They are all overlaid by a strong metro mayor and a twenty-six-member council that encompasses the entire Jefferson County the entire metropolitan Louisville.

[It was] expected that … local property tax collection, would become a function of metro government, but … the tradition was asserted [that] the sheriff collected the property tax … [Also] you have two levels of taxation, a suburban tax rate in unincorporated Jefferson County (… small cities have an additional local tax), [and] … an old city tax that provides additional urban services. We forgot to list exactly what those urban services are. We … have a handshake acknowledgment as to what they are. [T]he folks in the suburbs, especially in the unincorporated areas in the suburbs … when they voted for merger, I think they thought they were going to get urban services without any increase in their local property taxes, which is kind of crazy.

Windows of Opportunity

Nearly across the board, the commentators all mentioned that successful collaboration efforts were based on the agile identification of particular opportunities for service or function consolidation. More often than not, the examples offered were technical in nature, for example, public safety dispatch, information technology, or risk management. Probably, this is due to the facts that these functions and services all use the same technology and processes, are easily evaluated due to standards for use, greatly benefit from economies of scale, and are often internal to government and thus transparent to citizens when changed. Along these lines, Jeff Downes offered some compelling examples of technical consolidation from his current and past experience:

What we have done in Vestavia Hills is more on an ad hoc basis rather than … taking a strategy and working it …. We’ve just taken opportunities to consolidate or work with our fellow governments where we can get some efficiencies or effectiveness without total consolidation. And the best example of that is … consolidation … of our 911 dispatch …. All of the … entities in Jefferson County had their own dispatch … the cost of the infrastructure [to refresh our technology … was overwhelming] …. [S]o we simply consolidated our 911 service with … Shelby County which is next to Jefferson County …. We repurposed the dispatchers, contracted with Shelby County to do our 911 dispatch services, and saved half a million dollars a year and have better service after the consolidation …. [T]here are things, whether it’s 911 services, GIS services, big-ticket items for the smaller municipalities where they can … consolidate … a particular service by service evaluation as opposed to a total consolidation of government (where historically, based on the challenges of the deep south, [it can be] difficult). [T]he article really does point out the logical reasons behind consolidation, but sometimes there are great hurdles to that and the best way to get to it, in my opinion, is to take it opportunity by opportunity.

Another experience I’ve had goes back to the capital of Alabama, Montgomery, which I served as a [non-elected] Deputy Mayor for 26 years … The City and the County leadership … faced the same racial equity issues faced in the Birmingham–Jefferson County area but the leadership wanted to look at consolidation, merger of opportunities. [S]imilar to what we have done in Vestavia Hills … we consolidated IT services [and we consolidated GIS] between Montgomery County and the City of Montgomery. [This was] something that we took away from [studying] Louisville [that had] a third party entity [from which] all the public sector organizations and even the utility companies bought a subscription … to … centralized GIS services. [W]e took that concept and implemented it …. [I]n Montgomery they just consolidated Risk Management services. They have a City and a County Risk Management department that … buys health benefits for both city and County employees, takes advantage of those economies of scale … I think of it as [a] snowball rolling down hill. If you get some momentum in some easy areas maybe the politicians, the elected officials, see the value of ultimately merging at even a grander, higher level. I boil this down to … consolidation … driven … by … opportunity.

This sort of opportunistic, functional consolidation can have two effects. First, as indicated in Jeff Downe’s comments, it might help overcome existing barriers to fuller consolidation over time. Second, jurisdictions might become largely consolidated operationally leading to a sort of bottom-up or de facto consolidation. This might reduce the prospects for further full-jurisdictional consolidation in governance functions, even if desirable, by reducing the perceived marginal gains. Laura Mathis offers an interesting example from her experience:

An effort … recently failed in Middle Georgia … in my opinion … because they had done so much functional consolidation that the voters said, “Why?” They felt they were losing representation by consolidating …. They had several failed attempts and after … [a] … recent failed attempt [became] very intentional [about] opportunities … [to] consolidate services. [L]aw enforcement was … consolidated … under the sheriff when the police chief retired and … they just seized … opportunities when they happened …. [G]overnance and administration … wasn’t consolidated and the voters [asked], “Why go through all that change and headache if we can just continue on?”

Leadership

Another factor identified by the expert panel was leadership. Panelists pointed to a particular type of leadership was durable, knowledgeable, trusted, and not self-interested, rather than just charismatic, ad hoc, or strong. This notion of leadership fits well with their other two notions of opportunity and politics because such leaders have the knowledge to identify opportunities, possess the political capital to create political opportunity and overcome situational barriers, and they are perceived as representing others rather than just themselves and therefore can be trusted and followed. Tom Owen identified this dynamic in the Louisville case:

The other factor is a great leader. We had had a mayor … who had somehow strung one term after another [and] that “mayor-for-life” had become [perceived] in the community as the mayor for the entire Jefferson County. So he was able to be a cheerleader for the referendum. We began merged government in 2003.

Likewise, Jeff Downes recounted a particular instance in Vestavia Hills when change was catalyzed by a long-standing leader who sacrificed his own power for the greater good:

With the right elected officials … who are thinking beyond their own borders or their own political life [things are possible]. We in Vestavia Hills had a strong mayor council form of government up until 2012 when it shifted to a City Manager form … and the mayor [became] the president of the city council. That mayor, who is the mayor today, was the forty-five-year fire chief for the city of Vestavia Hills who retired, ran for Mayor and won as a strong-mayor … and then supported the consolidation to City Manager … and basically gave up his authority as the CEO. He did that because he is a fine man who saw that, long term, in a relatively small city, the ability to get good elected talent to be the CEO [was not there, and that] having professional management [and having] the elected officials drive the policy rather than the implementation … was a window of opportunity in Vestavia Hills.

Conclusion: When the Stars Align

As a group, the commentators agreed that success in a local consolidation effort was dictated as much by a unique moment in the history, politics, and economy of a jurisdiction as it was by adopting a rational and appropriate route to a selected goal. They did not discount the value of analysis and, in fact, extolled its virtues and praised the usefulness of applied instruments like the one developed in the Uden article. Yet, they seemed united in a view that situations amenable to consolidation were unique and the characteristics desirable for them arose in distinctive circumstances. They seemed to share a view about consolidation efforts as an ultimate sociopolitical undertaking: no amount of evaluation can guarantee that goals are congruent or adaptable; no sort of analysis can identify the certain occasion on which to take action to reach them; no known calculation can chart a path that is assured to avoid all pitfalls.

In this view, outside of purely technical consolidation when standards and gains are clear, consolidation success is enabled by experience, intuition, and guidance. The job of local officials and those who work with them is to identify the particular moment when all the elements supporting a consolidation goal are present or the essential ones frustrating it are absent. They have to be on the lookout for the instant when a confluence occurs of compelling rationale, political prospects, and motivating leadership. They must be able to recognize when the moment is right. As Jeff Downes said:

[I]t’s basically a once in a lifetime situation when you have those stars align and I think to me that’s the lowest common denominator in a lot of the successful consolidation. Granted there’s other catalyst actions, there’s crises and so forth, but a lot of times even in the face of crisis, self-interested elected officials would still fight and say, “Hey I can solve the problem.”

As Laura Mathis said:

[I]t is about the stars aligning and whether it is from leadership or circumstances I think our job as local government officials, whether elected or staff, is to be open … and to realize that the greater good might be served by changing … (and change is hard!) whether it is the merger of a single service or full consolidation.

Successful consolidation of functions or of jurisdictions takes a measure of luck as well as skill. Even when a path is selected, negotiating it is like crossing a minefield with knowledge of where the mines are and a path through them: one needs still the good fortune to be sure that no mines have been moved and that none explode due to others traversing the field. For a consolidation journey to succeed, one might have a well-defined and fitting goal and an appropriate path through the situational obstacles to reach it, but the timing must be right, as well. That is, as the commentators put it, “the stars have to align.”

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.