City-county consolidations are generally a good thing, and there is a long history of it dating back to Philadelphia's consolidation in the 1850s. You can have sensible regional planning; tax-base and service sharing; you don't have things like the pull-up-the-drawbridges class warfare of places like the Grosse Pointes, or in the South and West unincorporated patches that don't get any municipal services whatsoever for no good reason (I think one of our CA posters had a question about that awhile ago?), or closer to home the less-obviously-harmful but still crazy and wasteful phenomenon of boroughitis which leads to all sorts of inefficiencies and regulatory arbitrage and all that bad stuff. In general, city governance should be at the metropolitan level as much as practicable, since that's the unit that really counts, and city-county consolidations are a step in that correct direction.
I understand that this can be a difficult thing to do in the real world; people have emotive attachments to their towns and there are real costs in switching over to anything new. And I'm willing to believe that said switchover can be screwed up; perhaps that's what happened in Canada since many of our friends up north seem to be bitter about it. Though, perhaps what happened in Canada could also have been BS cultural resentment (EWWW I don't wanna have to get along with those icky suburbs/urbs) or, worse, suburbs that benefitted by pretending to be separate from the core where convenient (while of course conveniently forgetting that they wouldn't exist without the core). Anyway. Obviously the details are tricky, but there are real and important benefits to consolidation.
I've believed for a long time that the City of Houston and Harris County should merge. A combination of a tax-hungry city government and NIMBY conservatives in the unincorporated suburbs means our city limits are bizarre and basically designed to contain as much commercial/industrial real estate as possible (to collect property and sales taxes from) while avoiding as many residential neighborhoods as possible. It makes infrastructure planning harder and because city policy often impacts everyone in the county since so many of us work in the city, we end up with no taxation
and no representation.
Example: I grew up in what was technically unincorporated Harris County. But, if I walked down the street to the next street over, I was suddenly in the City of Houston. Just the street itself - none of the houses on the street. Why? So that the country club would be in the Houston city limits and all of their membership dues and food and beverage sales would be subject to city taxes.
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