City-county consolidation in a likely future of continual financial exigency

Is a difficult issue, and continues to happen at a slow pace. Indianapolis in Indiana, and Louisville, and Lexington in Kentucky are examples. But more than a decade ago, "Metropolitan" Toronto deconsolidated. Myron Orfield has written about this kind of effort, in Metropolitics.

A goodly part of this has to do with equity, since higher income households have left center cities, making it more difficult to raise funds through property taxes to provide services, sometimes in the face of increasing needs, on a more limited population base. So the idea is to link the suburban and city governments, and have one combined revenue stream. Although Orfield writes more about land use implications and being able to deal with sprawl.

In a couple small places where I have worked, for example down South, Brunswick is a small community in a small county (Glynn County, Georgia), it seems to make sense for the County and the City to consolidate and better coordinate resources. In Brunswick, a couple years ago, the City and County did consolidate waste and water services.

But as it looks to be a much more difficult financial environment for local governments going forward, especially in places that are deindustrializing, e.g., Pittsburgh vis-a-vis Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, where this has been discussed also (see "Ravenstahl endorses Pittsburgh-Allegheny County merger" from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), and looking at other places, such as in rural Maryland, it could also make sense as well.