A metro merger wave: could it be?

Could America be ready for a wave of city-county consolidations?

Until this year, it would have seemed madness to suggest so. From the 1960s, when Nashville, Jacksonville, and Indianapolis put together mergers, no major city merged until Louisville and surrounding Jefferson County voted to join in a dramatic 2000 referendum.

Even then, I treated Louisville as an odd region out-a place where an array of city and county services, economic development efforts, even a wage tax base, had been shared for years.

But rub your eyes and catch what's occurring at this very moment:

In Buffalo, Erie County Executive Joel Giambra is calling for a "New Greater Buffalo," a totally new government to replace the traditional city and county' structures that he and Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello agree are no longer viable.

Masiello argues: "Let's be bold and get away from nit-picking over who absorbs whom and creating a rehash of two older governments."

The bottom line, Giambra and Masiello insist, is that the Buffalo/Upstate New York economy is unraveling and that dramatic action is imperative to save scarce public funds and promote the region as a unified, can-do place.

Just as dramatic, Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy and Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato have shocked the Pennsylvania political world by suggesting the time has come for their two governments to study outright merger.

For the Pittsburgh area, whose 418 cities, boroughs, and townships (130 in Allegheny County alone) make it the fragmentation capital of America, true success at putting rivalry and competition to the side would be a kind of early 21st century miracle.

But like Buffalo, Pittsburgh faces dire operating deficits brought on t)y decades of industrial flight, sagging land values. dwindling population, and lack of the major immigrant influx that has enlivened many cities' economies.

Both cities are now under state fiscal control boards--even as suburbanites, in the words of Bill Toland in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, are "forced to watch as ... (the) hub city suffers, mulling the prospect that a withering core will eventually drag its suburbs, and the region, down with it."

Yet fresh talk of merger isn't even limited to worst-suffering Buffalo and Pittsburgh. It's reported, in one form or another, in Cleveland, in Rochester, Syracuse, and Binghamton in New York, and in Erie and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania.

Bad times are the mother of necessity, driving Frostbelt regions to consider bold new steps, notes Mark Muro of the Brookings institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

Muro and his colleague Bruce Katz argue that duplication and inefficiencies triggered by convoluted, Rube Goldberg systems of government are less the focus now. Instead, economic competitiveness drives the debates-the argument that regions tangled in multiple layers of government exhaust their energy competing internally rather than positioning themselves for the new global economy.

Truly competitive regions, they argue, are agile enough to "move with alacrity to seize opportunities and mobilize coalitions to pursue common goals. They are bold, flexible, and fast."

Right now, Giambra sees his Buffalo region in competition with Pittsburgh to see which "goes first to reach the goal of genuine regional government that works smarter, better, and cheaper"--in the process generating "new energy" that attracts new investment "and a new reputation for innovation."

The argument of regional competitiveness was used strategically to put a city-county merger over the top in Louisville. Proponents argued Louisville could vault from the 64th-most-heavily populated U.S. city to 23rd. In Pittsburgh's case, a city-county merger would lift the city from 52nd to an impressive No. 7 in the nation.

Merger efforts do face enormous obstacles. Will privileged suburbs react viscerally in opposition? What to do about an older center city's debts, pension liabilities, and labor agreements? Will African-Americans, their numbers often concentrated within historic city limits, fear loss of electoral clout?

Then there are thickets of state laws that make mergers tough. In Buffalo now, civic activist Kevin Gaughan, a long-time leader for regional cohesion, is wisely commissioning research into legal hurdles under New York law in preparation for big-time public debate in a televised "Buffalo Conversation" on merger potentials this June.

And Giambra has been able to report that Gov. George Pataki--a Republican, like himself--is interested in Buffalo-Erie County serving as a "pilot project" for new forms of governance in New York state.

Separately, New York Assemblyman Sam Hoyt has sponsored a bill to let Erie County municipalities voluntarily opt into a compact for shared economic development, land use, and other issues. There would be significant carrots in added state aid and permissions for towns that join up. Hoyt calls it "regionalism by negotiation"--a possible (and maybe easier-to-pass) alternative to outright merger.

Whatever the outcomes, it is deliciously good news that the cauldron of regional reform is finally bubbling again.

Copyright [c] 2004, The Washington Post Writers Group. Reprinted with permission. The views expressed in this column are the author's and do not represent the official position of GFOA.

NEAL PEIRCE is a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C. His weekly column, which appears in more than 50 newspapers nationwide, examines trends and innovations in state and local government, E-mail: [e-mail].