Town hall meeting to address issue

Sunday, October 26, 2003

By Bill Toland, Post-Gazette Harrisburg Bureau

For a full merger of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County governments and services to happen, about a thousand things would have to fall into place.

Right now, we're maybe on thing No. 4. Only 996 to go.

But whether those remaining steps ought to be pursued is a different question altogether.

Would it be better to have one countywide government and more countywide services? Some of Pittsburgh's brightest policy wonks say no. Some say yes.

Either way, it's an idea that merits more discussion, if only because of the attention being given now nationwide to the issue of metropolitan mergers. That's one reason the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has organized a town hall meeting to be held from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland.

	See an index to the Metrovisions series  The Post-Gazette Town Meeting on regional government, sponsored by Duquesne Light, will be held Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. Scheduled panelists are Susan Hockenberry, director of the Local Government Academy; Chris Lochner, manager and finance director of Hampton Township; Doris Carson Williams, CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania and co-chair of the Pittsburgh 21 Task Force; Tom Waseleski, the Post-Gazette's editorial page editor; and John Craig, the paper's former executive editor. David Shribman, the Post-Gazette's current executive editor, will moderate the discussion. The event is free and open to the public, but those interested in attending are asked to register by calling 412-263-1541.

The question to be posed at the meeting: Is merger the answer to our struggling region? The answer: Maybe, but not totally.

"While this merger is often defended in the name of 'efficiency,' the relatively small overlap between city of Pittsburgh and [Allegheny] County functions suggests something else is at work," said Charles T. Rubin, associate professor of political science at Duquesne University and a vocal opponent of the merger concept.

"I suppose that merging would mean that the suburban tax base would be available to support present city services and obligations," he said. "The merger is a great idea, then, if in the name of an excessively egalitarian notion of fairness you want to reward the city for its bad decisions and punish the suburbs for being relatively more successful."

The counter-argument is that suburbs are more "successful," not because they are more financially astute, but because decades of anti-city policies and a national shift over the last half century from manufacturing to service industries have encouraged suburban growth and inner city decline.

The city of Pittsburgh has suffered not only from this trend, but also from sitting in a county with 130 separate governments. That may have diminished the city's chances of succeeding financially even further, because industries and other big businesses could locate near the city, but not in it, and get the benefit of lower tax rates in those other jurisdictions.

Those disparities have led Ben Fischer, public policy and labor professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School, to conclude emphatically that "we don't need more than one government; there's no rational reason except history, and the illusion that the smaller the unit of government, the more democracy you have."

Efficiencies of scale?

Even if Pittsburgh were able to absorb all of Allegheny County and wipe out the smaller municipal governments, which would require the passage of special state legislation, would a merger really streamline government as promised?

The theory is that by providing services to a lot of people with just one government, you achieve an efficiency of scale.

The ultimate test for that would seem to be New York City, which manages what used to be five separately governed boroughs -- Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island.

It's the ultimate regional government -- one mayor, 8 million people. But the per capita city tax burden in New York City in 1990 was more than $2,000 per person. There also were more than 600 city employees for every 10,000 city residents, the highest ratio in the country.

New York, the supreme regional government, is also a supremely expensive one.

That's an extreme example, though.

The truth is, the evidence of savings from government mergers is all over the map. Indianapolis's government, which merged city and county three decades ago, spent $937 per person in 1990, and employs 175 people for every 10,000 city residents. Jacksonville spent $1,027 per person, with 170 workers per 10,000 residents. Nashville spent $982. Charlotte, $1,084.

Unmerged, unconsolidated Pittsburgh, in 1990, checked in at a per capita tax burden of $936 per person.

Those numbers, which don't take cost of living differences into account and haven't been updated since the latest census, do little to settle the issue of whether a consolidated, regional government would translate into a cheaper, more efficient government.

Still, one of the reasons merger talk keeps rearing its beguiling head is the perception, true or not, that Western Pennsylvania has way too many inefficient government bodies.

David Miller, an associate dean at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School for Public and International Affairs, thinks that's the case.

He's come up with a sophisticated equation to measure "power diffusion," which is a fancy way of describing how many local governments are involved in providing a variety of public services.

According to Miller's scale, the Pittsburgh region delivers services to its residents more inefficiently than all but four other regions -- Chicago, Boston, St. Louis and, the list's top dog, Philadelphia.

Unifying services

Still, Miller recognizes that the number of governments here isn't likely to be reduced any time soon. "The problem should not be structured as 'too many governments,' " Miller said.

Instead, the problem is "to find and implement ways to minimize the adverse effects of a high number of local governments."

How exactly do we do that? Mostly through cost-sharing of all aspects of government -- police, public works, administrative functions, even tax collection. In Allegheny County, each municipality and school district has its own tax collector, or has its own contract with a tax-collection agency.

"Four or five people can handle all of the administrative duties of tax collection throughout the county," said Fischer, the CMU professor. Expecting each borough to cough up cash to pay for its own tax collector is wasteful, he said. "These are extravagances."

Most of the experts whose brains were picked for this story said that service mergers -- but not necessarily a total merger of governments -- would be the most realistic path for Pittsburgh to follow if it wants to save money in the short term.

Miller and Fischer both said purchasing and payroll offices for Pittsburgh and Allegheny County could easily be consolidated into a single office.

Rubin, on the other hand, said that government bodies "already cooperate when they see it as mutually advantageous" to do so, and he doesn't view Allegheny County's 130 municipalities as excessive.

"There is no magic formula that reveals how many governments there should be for a given population or a given land area," he said.

"The only real measure is the satisfaction of citizens with the governments that represent them.

"While some people may be unhappy with the policies of this or that unit of government, I have seen no evidence suggesting that there is widespread dissatisfaction in any of our suburbs with the fact that those governments exist in the first place.

"People may want their local governments to do better, but where do they want them to disappear?"

In some places in the United States, though, citizens do get by with far fewer governments.

Indianapolis, Nashville, Jacksonville, Columbus and other cities have merged with their surrounding counties in the past few decades, and this year, Louisville, Ky., joined the pack when its city and county governments merged into a bigger, whiter and wealthier metropolitan area.

Regionalism is hot

Supporters of Louisville's regional government have promised the usual benefits -- more nimble administration, more competitive job recruitment, population retention, improved social services and streamlined bureaucracy.

Tthe Louisville story has suddenly made the idea of regionalism hot again, in Pennsylvania and across the U.S.

The latest revival of regionalism actually started a decade ago -- Neal Peirce's "Citistates" was published in 1993, as was David Rusk's "Cities Without Suburbs." Anthony Downs' "New Vision for Metropolitan America," came next, "Regional Excellence," by Bill Dodge, right after, and "Metropolitics," by Myron Orfield, in 1997.

Rusk, ex- mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., and son of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, notes that Pittsburgh faces one major obstacle that other regions don't -- every square inch of land in Pennsylvania is incorporated, meaning it's governed by a local council or commissioners' board.

In Louisville, by contrast, the city was surrounded by several incorporated suburbs, which were allowed to retain their municipal identities and tax-collecting powers after the merger, but also by acres upon acres of unincorporated land where there was no local government to dissolve.

So when Louisville's borders expanded to match those of Jefferson County, the people living in the unincorporated areas simply began paying their taxes to the city instead of to the county.

But unless Pittsburgh's suburbs could somehow be convinced to dissolve themselves -- and again, that could be achieved only if special legislation were approved -- a Louisville-style Pittsburgh and Allegheny County merger would result in only a superficial combination of the two governments.

Under such an arrangement, the county's entire population would be counted as Pittsburgh's population in the federal census, but all the separate suburban governments would remain intact and keep their tax bases.

With no substantial change in the tax base for the city, Rusk said, "city voters would be swapping a mayor and a city council for a county executive and county council, merely eliminating one group of elected officials" for another.

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