Tag Archives: local government

The difficulties of merging or dissolving local governments in Pennsylvania

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Pennsylvania has the third-most local governments but there is difficulty in trying to merge or dissolve these bodies:

Lawmakers are considering a bill that would allow dissolution and limit municipalities’ stay in the state’s distressed program. Thirteen cities have been stuck with that designation for at least a decade, and fragmentation at the local level makes it harder to turn them around, said Matt Fabian, managing director at Concord, Mass.-based research firm Municipal Market Advisors…Some localities have shrunk so much they may be unable to operate, according to Ross. The communities are stagnating as Pennsylvania’s economy is falling behind, with job and population growth trailing most states, said Standard & Poor’s…

In Pennsylvania, every square inch of land must be incorporated, preventing dissolution. Municipalities in Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Vermont also restrict dissolution, said Michelle Wilde Anderson, who studies distressed communities as an assistant professor at University of California Berkeley School of Law…

The path of merger or consolidation is often unavailable because municipalities are reluctant to take on neighbors, which may be distressed.

This sounds like a two-step process:

1. Providing the legal means for dissolving local governments. Residents may not think about it much but a group of local residents can’t simply declare themselves an incorporated community or start collecting local taxes – this process has regulations and procedures.

2. But, even if such moves were legal, the article hints at another difficult issue: getting communities or governments to agree to merge with others. Americans are generally unwilling to give up local control, even in difficult financial times, or to take on the problems of nearby local entities that might threaten their quality of life. As an example, see the shift in the late 1800s as suburbs stopped desiring annexation from big cities.

Given the financial difficulties a lot of local governments face, I suspect stories about this will be more common in the coming years. Yet, consolidation or dissolving is not a quick process and generally requires consent from all parties involved.

Why Chicago suburbs are facing more FOIA requests

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The Daily Herald reports that a number of Chicago suburbs have seen an uptick in Freedom of Information Act requests in recent years:

A Daily Herald survey of 55 municipalities showed that the number of Freedom of Information Act requests received has increased in nearly all towns over the past few years that officials have been tracking the numbers. Between 2011 and 2013, 17 suburbs saw an increase of more than 25 percent. Towns including Aurora, Hampshire, Des Plaines and Prospect Heights saw the number of requests increase by more than 50 percent.

Municipal clerks and lawyers said that responding to these requests takes staff time and money away from other responsibilities to the point of being a burden, but First Amendment experts say it is worth the cost to increase transparency of government.

The requests aren’t all coming from investigative journalists looking to expose corruption, but mostly from regular citizens looking for police reports and information about their homes or their neighbors.

There are several reasons thrown out for the increase in requests: a change in the law in 2010, people seeking more information, businesses looking for background information for their proposals and developments, occasionally a personal vendetta.

I wonder if there aren’t three broader trends that are also contributing:

1. The Internet makes all sorts of information available. And yet, government doings are either hard to track down or obscured. When the rest of the world is opening up its data, is the government keeping up? (At the same time, I’ve heard local government officials suggest the public has more ways than ever to find out things including watching meetings and reading minutes online.)

2. Trust in institutions, such as local government, has been on the decline for several decades. People want to know what local government is doing because they don’t necessarily trust them to act in their interests.

3. With an economic downturn, people are more interested in knowing where their taxes are going. This is particularly true at the local level when many suburbanites want the paradox of higher property values (meaning their investment in housing pays off) but with lower property taxes and better local services. This also leads to a mentality that local government works for the people and should have no problem processing FOIA requests.

Given the time it can take to track down these requests, I’m sure this is something local governments are keeping their eyes on.

 

Northern Virginia residents unhappy about paying higher taxes and getting fewer local services

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Echoing residents of many American communities, Northern Virginia residents don’t like the idea of paying increasing local taxes and not getting higher levels of local services:

At packed public meetings and in angry phone calls, local officials say, the same message is echoing from all sides: We’re fed up.

“It’s very frustrating, right now, to try to manage expectations,” said Sharon Bulova, chairman of the Board of Supervisors in Fairfax County, which, like neighboring Loudoun County, is locked in a battle over school funding that could lead to a higher tax rate — and even larger monthly payments…

Cuts to libraries, parks, schools and bus routes since the 2008 recession have negatively affected the quality of life of some residents in this part of Virginia, where top schools and amenities have long been a magnet for families. When much-needed infrastructure projects were launched, officials often paid for them by creating special tax districts and other charges that they passed on to increasingly resentful residents and businesses.

In Fairfax, sewer rates have nearly doubled since 2008, to $6.62 per 1,000 gallons of water, while real estate property taxes have climbed nearly 20 cents during the same period to a current level of $1.085 per $100 of assessed value. That means a house worth $500,000 in 2008 would have had a property tax bill of $4,450, and a house of the same value today would have a bill of $5,425.

Fairfax officials recently advertised a new residential property tax rate cap of $1.105 per $100 of assessed value, which will allow the county to raise the rate by up to two cents to fill a $64?million funding gap projected by school district officials. There is also a push to raise the tax rate in Loudoun, to bridge a $40?million school funding shortfall.

When there is plenty of suburban growth, new money is rolling in from developer fees and new taxpayers. But, in prolonged economic downturns, it is difficult to generate the same levels of money.

I wonder if either of these arguments would work with suburban taxpayers:

1. The reduction in service levels is probably quite limited.

2. These are still some of the wealthiest counties in the United States.

It is not as if these relatively wealthy counties will suddenly become like Third World countries. However, neither of these might matter as residents moved there in part to benefit from these local services.

Note: this is not just a problem in northern Virginia. For example, New Jersey leads the country in property taxes and the bill keeps growing in a number of New Jersey communities.

“Who Governs” the city?

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Political scientist Robert Dahl authored the influential 1961 book Who Governs? and here is a quick summary of his work upon his recent death:

His career lasted for more than half a century, but he was best known for the 1961 publication “Who Governs?” Cited by the Times Literary Supplement as among the 100 most influential books since World War II, “Who Governs?” probed the political system of Dahl’s own community at the time, New Haven, which he considered an ideal microcosm for the country: two strong parties, a long history and a careful progression from patrician rule to self-made men to party rule, where candidates of varied ethnic and economic backgrounds – a garage owner, an undertaker, a director of publicity – might succeed.

Dahl wanted to know who really ran the city, and, by extension, the country. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, in “The Power Elite,” had written that wealth and power were concentrated within a tiny group of people. Dahl believed no single entity was in charge. Instead, there were competing ones – social, economic and political leaders whose goals often did not overlap. He acknowledged that many citizens did not participate in local issues and that the rich had advantages over the poor, but concluded that New Haven, while a “republic of unequal citizens,” was still a republic.

Dahl’s conclusions were strongly challenged in the 1970s by sociologist G. William Domhoff, who used research provided in part by Dahl himself to find that he had underestimated the power of the business community and overestimated the divisions among New Haven’s leaders. Domhoof alleged that Dahl relied too much on the people he spoke with.

“It may be that the most serious criticism I can make of Dahl is that he never should have done this interview-based study in the first place, for it was doomed from the start to fall victim to the ambitions and plans of the politicians, planners, lawyers and businessmen that he was interviewing,” Domhoff wrote.

Impressive – many social scientists could only dream of having a book that is named among the most influential.

This debate is related to a leading perspective in urban sociology, the political economy paradigm, which argues that urban development is the result of powerful and politically connected actors. In cities and suburbs, development is often the work of politicians and the FIRE industries – finance, insurance, and real estate – working together to make money. These groups, dubbed growth machines, can access a range of resources not available to average citizens including credit, political influence, and public booster efforts often led by leading citizens and local media. Across cities and locales, the particular configuration of growth machines can differ but the key is to know where to first look when understanding development.

American economic recovery varys widely by county

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A recent analysis of county-level data regarding recovering from the economic crisis shows winners and losers:

About half of the nation’s 3,069 county economies are still short of their prerecession economic output, reflecting the uneven economic recovery, according to a new report from the National Association of Counties…

The report, released Monday, examined four economic indicators: GDP, total number of jobs, unemployment rates and home prices. It found wide variations.

Almost 400 counties saw no decline in GDP from their prerecession levels. Large counties were hit hard by the recession, but have recovered relatively strongly.

The roughly 800 counties boasting prerecession employment levels by 2013 are mostly in the Midwest and South. And just 54 had achieved their prerecession level of unemployment last year, the report said.

In other words, the overall figures suggest some counties have done well while others continue to struggle. Just curious: what can be done at the county level in many of these places? Counties are one level of local government but they are more influential in some places that others.

 

Small city mayors return to normal life

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While big city mayors get plenty of attention for trying to get stuff done, what happens to mayors of smaller communities when they leave office? Here are five examples from the Chicago suburbs:

The 57-year-old Birutis now works as the director of finance and administration for St. John the Baptist Catholic Church and school in Winfield. She took the job a few months before stepping down as mayor…

In September, DeWitte was named Kane County’s latest representative to the Regional Transportation Authority…

Mulder is a member of the Metra board, although she’s said she’ll step down when her term ends in June 2014.

She continues to lead the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission, a group dedicated to reducing aircraft noise in the neighborhoods surrounding the busy airport…

Since leaving the mayor’s office in Mundelein, the 49-year-old Kessler has continued working as a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at Roslyn Franklin University in North Chicago.

None of these mayors fought battles this large but for some reason I’m reminded of Cincinnatus and his return to normal life. From what I know of local government, many local officials get into it in the first place because of some issue they want to address or fix in the community in which they live. Such moves are rarely motivated by big party politics as local municipal elections in the US tend to be between local factions or unaffiliated candidates. And being a mayor is often not a full-time job so retaining a job still often matters. Yet, it is interesting to note that three of these five mayors are still involved with regional or intergovernmental boards. Being a mayor of a smaller community can lead to other positions that affect a broader range of residents.

While the article is headlined “Weren’t you the mayor?”, I suspect most residents in their communities wouldn’t know the former mayor if they saw them. Such is the fate of local officials in communities where voting turnout is often low.

New report says Chicago area transit agencies have a host of issues

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Here are some of the issues facing Chicago area transit agencies according to an Illinois task force:

• The Metra scandal demonstrated that “those responsible for the transit system do not always have the rider’s best interests at heart.” Many transit board members are appointed without background checks and there are no ethics rules or discipline for those guilty of misdeeds, the task force found.

• There are four transit boards with 47 people appointed by 16 elected officials. The system leads to a lack of accountability and “makes it difficult to know who is responsible when the system is not functioning well,” the report stated. Instead of pushing for excellence, boards are more about representing political or geographic constituencies.

• A 2007 Illinois auditor general’s report found duplication and lack of coordination among various transit fiefdoms. That situation hasn’t improved in the past six years, the task force found.

• A coordinated regional transit plan to increase ridership is lacking. Traffic congestion has nearly tripled since 1980 but the percentage of commutes to work using transit have dropped from 18 percent to 13 percent in that time frame.

• The transit system under-serves the region. Only 53 percent of jobs in the six-county area can be reached using transit within 90 minutes, according to one estimate and another projection puts that number at 24 percent.

• Funding formulas encourage turf wars and a “divisiveness that splits the region and creates competition,” the report found.

Sounds like too many agencies with members who represent all sorts of groups (and perhaps not the riders) leading to a system that is not so great.

If the problems are easy to spot, what are some workable solutions? Illinois is known for fragmented government bodies – many levels with lots of groups having access to tax dollars – so this wouldn’t necessarily be easy to change. Are there models from other metropolitan areas that could produce a better mass transit system? What might Chicago area residents get in mass transit if these problems were reduced?

Naperville mayor names volunteer leaders for outreach to Chinese, Indian residents

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Naperville has a growing Asian population and the mayor recently named two volunteers as leaders of outreach efforts from the city to Chinese and Indian residents:

Pradel this week announced the creation of the outreach positions to be filled by Bill Liu, who will work with Chinese residents, and Krishna Bansal, who will reach out to the city’s Indian community.

“We have such a diversified city that I’ve been wanting to kind of get on the cutting edge of bringing all our groups together,” Pradel said.

The outreach managers mainly will work to answer questions for Chinese and Indian residents and help them become more comfortable with the processes and procedures of city government, Pradel said. Liu and Bansal also will connect city leadership to important groups in the Chinese and Indian communities and stand in for Pradel if he’s unavailable for their meetings and events…

Pradel said he chose to begin outreach efforts among Chinese and Indian residents because they are two of the city’s largest minority groups. According to 2010 census data, 7.4 percent of Naperville residents are Indian and 3.9 percent are Chinese.

Appointing a similar leader to begin Hispanic outreach could be next, Pradel said. Hispanics and Latinos from all countries make up 5.3 percent of Naperville’s population, according to 2010 census figures. The rest of the city’s roughly 142,000 population is made up of 76.5 percent white people and 4.7 percent blacks.

Interesting move within the diversification of the suburbs more broadly but also within Naperville. It sounds like this is primarily about business opportunities, cultural events, and transmitting information from City Hall. The business part doesn’t surprise me – Naperville is known for its high-tech and white-collar jobs as well as growth – and suburbs are always looking for ways to improve communication with residents. The cultural events side could be interesting: could there be Chinese or Indian events in downtown Naperville in the near future? It also bears watching how outreach to Chinese, Indian, and Latino residents might differ in the future as issues of race/ethnicity, social class, and cultural practices intersect.

DuPage County looks to consolidate more than 400 taxing bodies

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Illinois is known for its plethora of taxing bodies but a new state law gives DuPage County the power to consolidate some of these bodies:

Under the new law, the county will be able to dissolve non-elected government agencies deemed outdated or inefficient following a full analysis and public review process…

“Frequently we find there’s another unit of government that could do the same thing,” said DuPage County Board Chairman Dan Cronin, who had pushed for the legislation. “Why don’t we just figure out who is going to be the odd man out?”

The narrowly written law currently applies only to DuPage County, which has more than 400 taxing bodies. State officials say they hope DuPage will serve as a model for other counties…

Cronin said his office will analyze each entity individually to determine whether there is the potential to save money and come up with a plan for how those services would still be provided. Residents would be able to weigh in during public hearings and could put together a referendum to fight a proposed dissolution.

The article mentions a few taxing bodies that are ripe for elimination but it will get more interesting when the County Board comes across ones that people want to defend and maintain. These local taxing bodies are all about local control and being able to spend tax dollars on one’s own interests or neighborhood. Pitting this suburban value, perhaps the guiding value for many suburbanites, versus wanting to have more efficient local government presents an interesting conflict.

Plus, how many taxing bodies will be eliminated under this new law? Is this law intended to get rid of just a few taxing bodies or does it involve a significant reduction from say over 400 to 300?

Richmond, CA wants to address foreclosures with eminent domain

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Richmond, California is seriously considering a more radical municipal approach to foreclosures:

The city has offered to buy more than 600 underwater mortgages at below the homes’ current value.

“If they are unwilling to negotiate a sale of the loans, which we want them to do, then we will consider using eminent domain as another option to purchase these loans at fair market value,” said Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin…

Richmond is the first city in the country to take the controversial step of threatening to use eminent domain, the power to take private property for public use. But other cities have also explored the idea…

Banks, the real estate industry and Wall Street are vehemently opposed to the idea, calling it “unconstitutional” and a violation or property rights, and something that will likely cause a flurry of lawsuits.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I suspect a number of communities would argue they have few other options in order to force the hands of mortgage providers.