Friday, 16. July 2010
Product Description
What is the optimal size of a local government unit? ‘Consolidation or Fragmentation? The Size of Local governments in Central and Eastern Europe’ addresses this policy relevant question in relation to the emerging democracies of the region.
Consolidation or Fragmentation?: The Size of Local Governments in Central Europe
Thursday, 8. July 2010
Merger Politics: Local Government Consolidation in Tidewater Virginia
Thursday, 25. February 2010
Product Description
Facing cutbacks in federal and state assistance and a new wave of taxpayer revolts, local governments have renewed interest in local government consolidation as a way of achieving efficiencies of scale in response to citizen demands for services. Yet the vast majority of consolidation efforts fail, either during the process of drafting a charter or once they reach the ballot – only five have passed since 1990; only thirty-two have been successfully implemented since the first, when the city of New Orleans merged with Orleans Parish in 1805. What accounts for the high failure rate and what factors led to successful consolidations? This volume presents thirteen comparable case studies of consolidation campaigns and distills the findings.
Case Studies of City-County Consolidation: Reshaping the Local Government Landscape
Thursday, 18. February 2010
Product Description
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.
City-County Consolidation and Its Alternatives: Reshaping the Local Government Landscape