With local government, more isn’t necessarily better

Joel Giambra likes his job. He’s been doing it for seven years and he’s pretty comfortable. But Giambra wants local voters to amend his city’s charter radically, and if he gets his way, his job as Buffalo, N.Y., comptroller may be history. See, Giambra is concerned about job loss in the state, which he ties to the high cost of government. That, he blames on the explosion in local governments. He points out that Erie County, which covers 1,045 square miles, has 1,010 local government entities. This problem is by no means limited to Erie County. Metropolitan Atlanta is surrounded by little bitty local governments that like nothing better than bullying the city, which gets back at them by dumping raw sewage in their water supplies.

And on a recent drive down the interstate in St. Louis, I was amazed by the “Welcome to [some city or town name]” signs that were close enough together – though not clever enough – to qualify as Burma Shave signs.

It seems like every time three or four people move into a subdivision, they elect a mayor and start taxing each other and griping about garbage pickup. It’s out of control. These little local governments and local government agencies and authorities are proliferating like ants around a dead caterpillar, often with results that are not nearly as fun to watch.

In Erie County, for instance, 19 police departments keep people safe. No doubt, it looks like the 4×400 relay when a bad guy starts running across jurisdictional lines. (There are pluses. With 33 fire districts, no one station has to invest in a very long hose.)

Still, eroding tax bases and turf wars are the inevitable result. Additionally everything from installing water meters to buying a police car becomes an experiment in fiscal terror.

To deal with the latter issue, the Georgia General Assembly, in a complete break with its tradition of incompetence, passed something called the Service Delivery Act, which directs all the state’s 157 counties (cities aren’t the only thing Georgia has too many of) to develop service delivery strategies and submit them to the state for approval by next July or risk losing all state funding. Fulton County’s commissioners and the mayors of the county’s cities, the main one being Atlanta, are currently working on a strategy that covers everything from land use to water and sewer rates to ending duplication of services.

That and Giambra’s charter revision movement are steps in the right direction.