Case Studies of City-County Consolidation


Book Description

Facing cutbacks in federal and state assistance and a new wave of taxpayer revolts, local governments have renewed interest in local government consolidation as a way of achieving efficiencies of scale in response to citizen demands for services. Yet the vast majority of consolidation efforts fail, either during the process of drafting a charter or once they reach the ballot - only five have passed since 1990; only thirty-two have been successfully implemented since the first, when the city of New Orleans merged with Orleans Parish in 1805. What accounts for the high failure rate and what factors led to successful consolidations? This volume presents thirteen comparable case studies of consolidation campaigns and distills the findings.




City-County Consolidation and Its Alternatives


Book Description

City-country consolidation builds upon the Progressive tradition of favoring structural reform of local governments. This volume looks at some important issues confronting contemporary efforts to consolidate governments and develops a theoretical approach to understanding both the motivations for pursuing consolidation and the way the rules guiding the process shape the outcome. Individual chapters consider the push for city-county consolidation and the current context in which such decisions are debated, along with several alternatives to city-county consolidation. The transaction costs of city-county consolidation are compared against the costs of municipal annexation, inter-local agreements, and the use of special district governments to achieve the desired consolidation of services. The final chapters compare competing perspectives for and against consolidation and put together some of the pieces of an explanatory theory of local government consolidation.







The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion


Book Description

With contributions from over fifty architects, planners, geographers, historians, and journalists, The Arsenal offers a wide-ranging view of the forces that shape our cities. Who gets to be where? The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion examines some of the policies, practices, and physical artifacts that have been used by planners, policymakers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists, and other urban actors in the United States to draw, erase, or redraw the lines that divide. The Arsenal inventories these weapons of exclusion and inclusion, describes how they have been used, and speculates about how they might be deployed (or retired) for the sake of more open cities in which more people have access to more places. With contributions from over fifty architects, planners, geographers, historians, and journalists, The Arsenal offers a wide-ranging view of the forces that shape our cities. With contributions from some of the best minds in architecture, such as Julie Behrens, Bill Bishop, Lisa Brawley, Ava Bromberg, Marshall Brown, Common Room, Charles Connerly, Nathan Connolly, Margaret Crawford, Alexander D'Hooghe, Elizabeth Evitts Dickenson, David Freund, Gerald Frug, Vincent James, Jeffrey Johnson, Michael Kubo, Kaja Kuhl, Matthew Lassiter, Amy Lavine, Setha Low, Thomas Oles, Michael Piper, Wendy Plotkin, Jenny Polak, Albert Pope, Mathan Ratinam, Brian Ripel, James Rojas, Theresa Schwarz, Roger Sherman, Susan Sloan, Lior Strahilevitz, Meredith TenHoor, William TenHoor, Thumb Projects (Graphic Design), Stephen Walker and Jennifer Yoos, among others. This publication won a Graham Foundation Grant