City-County Consolidation and Its Alternatives: Reshaping the Local Government Landscape

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. Part I: Political Consolidation and Progressive Reform 1. Perspectives on City-County Consolidation and Its Alternatives 2. Consolidation as a Local Government Reform Why City-County Consolidation Is an Enduring Issue 3. Do Consolidation Entrepreneurs Make a Deal with the Devil? Part II: Political Consolidation and Its Alternatives 4. Issues of Scale and Transaction Costs in City-County Consolidation 5. Annexation as a Form of Consolidation An Analysis of Central Core City Boundary Expansion in the United States During the Twentieth Century 6. Interlocal Agreements as an Alternative to Consolidation 7. Special Districts An Alternative to Consolidation Part III: The Politics of City-County Consolidation 8. Revolutionary Local Constitutional Change A Theory of the Consolidation Process 9. The Politics of City-County Consolidation Findings from a National Survey 10. Local Government Amalgamation from the Top Down 11. Making the Case for (and Against) City-County Consolidation A Qualitative Comparative Analysis 12. Institutional Choice, Collective Action, and Governance