Residents of Topeka and Shawnee County, Kansas, will soon begin a three-week mail-in voting period, ending December 15, on a proposal to merge their governments. Local leaders in Omaha and Douglas County, Nebraska, have nursed hopes of a merger for years.
The Indianapolis city council is set to vote next week on a proposal by Mayor Bart Peterson to merge the police department with the Marion County sheriff's office--something that didn't happen, obviously, with the "Unigov" merger 35 years ago. With council Republicans solidly opposed, changes for passage remain iffy.
But if Peterson prevails, it will surely give a boost to the rest of his consolidation plans, which stalled (fourth item) earlier this year in the state legislature.
There's one place where government consolidation isn't going to happen, though. I wrote a cover story for Governing back in 2001 about Erie County Executive Joel Giambra and his desire to merge the county with Buffalo. The welter of local jurisdictions there spend too much time poaching jobs from each other, Giambra argued, rather than cooperating to build up the struggling Western New York economy.
He had a point. Buffalo Mayor Tony Masiello soon agreed that his city should be folded into the county. (I'll have a profile of Byron Brown, Buffalo's new mayor, in Governing's December issue.) Consolidation became a cause among local civic activists, who hoped it could provide the key to the area's revival.
Most leaders of the other jurisdictions balked, however.Giambra hasn't won them over. His strategy of slowly winning converts by merging less politically touchy services, such as property assessments, hasn't worked.
The county, apparently, hasn't performed well even at the most mundane tasks, such as tree removal. "The city wants to take it back," says Canisius College political scientist Michael Haselswerdt, "because the county hasn't been able to attend to the issue of dead and threatening trees."
The reason the county can't perform such simple functions is the same reason regionalism is dead--Giambra's financial mismanagement. He slashed property taxes when he first took office, but he never cut spending. The county now is running a big deficit and the state has created a control board to keep an eye on its finances. (In a rare double whammy, both Erie County and Buffalo are now watched over by control boards.)
Giambra has become politically radioactive, so unpopular that candidates for local offices this month tripped over each other to use his name and image--in attacks on their opponents.
Giambra's fall has made his signature issue totally untenable. "It was shoot the messenger, and the message went down with him," says Kevin Hardwick, another political science prof at Canisius.
If there is one good place to talk about regionalism, though, it's Louisville, as we've written about repeatedly (third profile). If there's any interesting news out of the conference, I'll let you know.
