Number of local governments by state

[greenforest32]

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/05/does-having-lots-local-governments-help-or-hurt-economic-development/3283/

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[Hatman 🍁]

Interesting. I've always advocated for more local governments. Of course, I would give local governments very little power, thus solving the inefficiency problems. But giving citizens more access to democratic institutions is a good thing, and more local governments would provide that.

[greenforest32]

Interesting. I've always advocated for more local governments. Of course, I would give local governments very little power, thus solving the inefficiency problems. But giving citizens more access to democratic institutions is a good thing, and more local governments would provide that.

What exactly would people have access to in that example? Reform to expand access to new institutions with little or no power doesn't seem very useful inherently. Wouldn't it be better to reform the overall power structure if the goal is to increase influence?

[memphis]

I'm always amazed by how many suburbs Northern cities have. Every little neighborhood is its own little town. Seems needlessly complicated.

[bgwah]

We don't have a lot of tiny suburbs in the Seattle area. There is one cluster that's a wealthy enclave, and a few random ones spread out --- often they are small towns that were gobbled up by suburban sprawl but didn't really annex much land.

My suburb has around 82,000.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Interesting. I've always advocated for more local governments. Of course, I would give local governments very little power, thus solving the inefficiency problems. But giving citizens more access to democratic institutions is a good thing, and more local governments would provide that.

Yes, and when the state distributes services through local governments, they are fairly uniform and efficient.  For example, Medicaid applications are handled, processed, and approved at the local level... though some counties still rely on the state.

Earl is absolutely right.. local government is best.. but with a consistent, fair funding system and relatively little power. 

[traininthedistance]

Exhibit A:  

Exhibit B:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boroughitis

There are a whole host of problems with fragmented local government.  They lead to pretty gross inefficiency and inequity, as each town has to of course have its own police force or school district, when pooling resources would save vast amounts of money (and in the case of schools, give the kids more choices/resources) and ameliorate the problem wherein the rich towns have the best services and the poor places get stuck in a downward spiral.  And lots of small governmental units means that most of the people staffing those gov't units are going to be part-timers with not a lot of expertise, which opens up the danger of being swayed by lobbying pressure, for instance.

And, then, an excessive emphasis on locality can lead to pretty bad land-use decisions.  Say one town doesn't want a Wal-Mart because they'd like to preserve their downtown.  So Wal-Mart threatens to sets up shop right over the town line, playing off one municipality on another.  You get this sort of "race to the bottom" precinct shopping all the time.  Or maybe every town wants to have lots of commercial zoning to maximize their ratables, and they don't want any apartments to keep the riffraff out.  So commercial structures get massively overbuilt (leading to a collapse in the market), and poor people have no place to live.  These sorts of decisions make sense from a self-interested hyperlocal perspective, but inevitably hurt the region as a whole.

Larger, regional government is absolutely the right thing to do from a planning perspective.  This doesn't mean that localities should have no voice in government- far from it.  But the best way to do that is through neighborhood boards and such, which can serve as community liasons and in a general advisory capacity.

A higher number of local governments per person is obviously going to make sense in rural areas like the Dakotas.  If you've got vast empty spaces dotted with tiny villages, then sure local government for those tiny villages is going to be more practical.  The balkanization of suburbs around where I've lived, in NJ and PA, however, does nothing good for anybody (except maybe the lucky few in the best suburbs, who get super-exclusive "public" schools out of the deal- and even they're arguably hurt by it in the form of super-high property taxes).

[Padfoot]

Another major problem with too much local government within a metro area is the way businesses exploit tax incentives designed to attract new jobs in the region..  Companies hop around from city to city within the Columbus metro in order to send the cities into a tax-incentive bidding war.  Almost every month there is a story or blurb about how a business is moving its offices from one city to another within the same county because they were offered a better tax incentive.  This keeps the businesses from ever having to pay the full amount of local taxes and hurts the local government budgets which means they have to increase taxes on residents in order to continue providing basic services.  It also sucks up resources that could be better aimed at attracting new businesses and jobs to the region instead of allowing already established local companies to exploit the system.

One of the things that was unfortunately drowned out in the debate about SB 5 here in Ohio was Gov. Kasich's call to reduce the level of duplication in local services.  One of the major goals of the legislation was to increase incentives for local governments to pool resources.  There is already some of that happening in Ohio but as you can see from the map we are on the higher end of things when it comes to the number of local governments and cooperation is definitely not that common. 

One of the biggest problems I think we have is the shear number of school districts.  We have over 600 school districts in our state which puts the average number of students per district at less than 5,000.  We could deliver a far better education to our students if we were less focused on maintaining hyper-local control of "neighborhood schools" and we moved to a regional level magnet schools approach.  That way families could choose to send their kids to a STEM school or a music academy instead of everyone getting force fed the same vanilla HS Diploma that doesn't really qualify you for anything.  It would never fly though because the PTAs and school boards in every 100 person town would cry about how they were losing "local control" of their schools.

[Hatman 🍁]

Interesting. I've always advocated for more local governments. Of course, I would give local governments very little power, thus solving the inefficiency problems. But giving citizens more access to democratic institutions is a good thing, and more local governments would provide that.

What exactly would people have access to in that example? Reform to expand access to new institutions with little or no power doesn't seem very useful inherently. Wouldn't it be better to reform the overall power structure if the goal is to increase influence?

Yes, the power structure would have to change.

Police and fire would be the responsibility of the county government. Education should be at the state level. All the problems with having "too many local governments" can be rectified by shifting responsibilities. Counties should have more power. Local governments would ideally be run by volunteers (except for larger cities) and only be responsible for very local matters.

Ideally, municipal borders would be logical, and would be designed to follow community of interest boundaries. Citizens should have a say as to how these boundaries would follow. Sure, there is a concern of rich vs. poor enclaves, but if taxes are mostly done by the county, this fact wont matter (plus in the quasi-socialist utopia I envision, severe wealth inequality would be non existent). Local governments would not be taking in much tax, and would probably just be allotted a certain amount by the county.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A higher number of local governments per person is obviously going to make sense in rural areas like the Dakotas.  If you've got vast empty spaces dotted with tiny villages, then sure local government for those tiny villages is going to be more practical.

I suppose the situation might be different in places (like the Dakotas) that are functionally devoid of people, but in general that's not actually true. The great weakness of the pre-1974 local government system in Britain was all the little rural districts and municipal boroughs which often couldn't provide - or at least provide effectively - the services they were supposed to.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

They lead to pretty gross inefficiency and inequity, as each town has to of course have its own police force or school district, when pooling resources would save vast amounts of money (and in the case of schools, give the kids more choices/resources) and ameliorate the problem wherein the rich towns have the best services and the poor places get stuck in a downward spiral.

But, yes, this is an obscenity.

[All Along The Watchtower]

I'm always amazed by how many suburbs Northern cities have. Every little neighborhood is its own little town. Seems needlessly complicated.

Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and Atlanta have a ton of suburbs...

[traininthedistance]

A higher number of local governments per person is obviously going to make sense in rural areas like the Dakotas.  If you've got vast empty spaces dotted with tiny villages, then sure local government for those tiny villages is going to be more practical.

I suppose the situation might be different in places (like the Dakotas) that are functionally devoid of people, but in general that's not actually true. The great weakness of the pre-1974 local government system in Britain was all the little rural districts and municipal boroughs which often couldn't provide - or at least provide effectively - the services they were supposed to.

Yeah, I'm specifically thinking of places that are too dry to support the sort of rural densities you have in Europe, or even east of the Mississippi over here.  Where it really is just a little village surrounded by empty space and maybe a couple ranchers.

[kcguy]

Ever since I lived in Virginia, I've been amazed by how many levels of government I have back here in the Midwest.

In Virginia, I think I voted for 5 federal offices (counting Pres & VP as two), 5 state offices, and 5 municipal offices.  I had no county government, and the municipal government controlled pretty much everything.

In Kansas, I vote for 5 federal offices, 10 state offices, 3 county offices, 3 municipal offices, 3 school district seats, 6 community college board seats, and 7 water district seats.  And that list doesn't include judge retention elections.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Yeah... it's kind of a lot here as well...

Soil and water conservation district, township, school district, county, judicial district, state, federal

[Hatman 🍁]

In my utopic fantasy, you would vote for:

1) World President (using Alternate Vote)
2) Member of the World Parliament (using Alternative Vote)
3) Party Bloc for World Senate (using PR)

Repeat for the State level (Governor, MP, Senators)

Then there would be a county level, where you would elect a Warden and council (using AV) and then finally a municipal level, which would be elected similarly. So in total, a voter would be electing 10 positions. 

[muon2]

When I lived in New England I was amazed at how much was tied to the town, with the courts left for the county. Some functions were handled by a multi-town arrangement such as shared schools between smaller towns.

In the Midwest counties were divided into townships, but they had none of the power of New England towns. Cities and villages could annex across town lines as well as county lines. Also, unlike New England they could leave areas of unincorporated land that might still need services from the township.

Clearly everyone had to be in a school district so those lines were drawn for the convenience of transportation in the 1800's. As such they don't necessarily follow township or county lines. Also in IL there are still as many as four levels of school districts. In some places the K-8 and high school districts are still separate. Then there is a regional office of education with an elected superintendent and board to provide services to a large number of districts, roughly based on counties. Finally there are community college districts with their elected boards, and their lines don't always coincide with other school entities.

As residents looked for more services in the 1900, there were new types of districts: park, library, fire, soil and water, sanitary, lighting, mosquito abatement. Even though cities could provide all those services, unincorporated residents wanted them, too. They would vote to create those districts, and often take over city and village functions at the same time. The Midwest never saw them as county functions, so special districts were born.