What Works

What the signs are telling us….

Across Pennsylvania, the number and growth of government entities and taxing authorities has been a subject of discussion and concern for decades. Predictably, the focus on government efficiency and cost intensifies during difficult economic times. With a recent spike in the number of government entities in Erie County and abundant concern in all quarters about the cost and quality of our government, interest in regionalism and in achieving economies of scale with government is now as strong as it has ever been.

What Works: Traffic Patterns, Promising Practices, and Pilots

From a national scan of programs led by nonprofits that are making a difference in other communities, we see a focus on:

Mergers and Consolidations

Prompted by pending legislation, current dialogue in Pennsylvania centers around the presumed efficiencies associated with the merger of municipal governments into their host county government. This form a regionalization is controversial, and for good reason. Studies regarding the impact and benefit of merger and consolidation present a decidedly mixed picture:

• In a review of literature about city-county consolidation across the country over the past 25 years, the Government Innovators Network at Harvard University noted significant diseconomies of scale associated with such consolidations due to labor-intensive services, the growth of bureaucracies in larger systems, the high cost of merging personnel systems and services, and one-time transition costs like merging computer systems and conflicting rules and regulations.

• The Center for Rural Pennsylvania commissioned a study to examine the impact of school district mergers and found that there was no evidence to support that bigger districts are better districts in terms of cost efficiency, administrative capacity, or academic achievement.

• The Pennsylvania Association of Township Supervisors points to the efficiency and effectiveness of townships that have been doing more with less, finding ways to be creative and innovative with personnel at the local level and getting the job done with the resources at hand. The association cites no failing or bankrupt townships and a degree of local accountability that is appreciated by residents across the state.

Collaboration and Efficiency

Governments that are making strides with collaboration and efficiency are finding more success with bottoms-up approaches rather that top-down fixes, as recent experience in Connecticut indicates. Towns in that state are finding ways to pursue the collaborative solutions that make sense locally: purchasing cooperatives and regional promotion of common interest priorities like tourism, economic development, and cooperative education. Conclusions from Connecticut’s 2010 breakthroughs in funding regional innovation and planning, reducing state unfunded mandates, and promoting regionalism through large-scale purchasing cooperatives and collaboration on education, transportation, and other common interests include:

• State government needs to promote and fund innovation financially, then get out of the way.
• The state needs to re-evaluate policies and statutes that cost the towns money.
• Existing regional entities and planning bodies are the key to creating efficiencies.
• Barriers to health care and purchasing cooperatives must be removed.

Philanthropic On-Ramps

Modest philanthropic investments that can get Regionalism in Erie County moving in the fast lane:

The Connecticut experience, while positive, turned largely on the state’s capacity to provide funding to spur and nurture innovation. In today’s economic climate at the state level, such funding is far from guaranteed, leaving a valuable role for the philanthropic sector which could include:

• Grants to local government entities or to nonprofits acting in concert with those entities who will together work to explore, incentivize, and implement efficiencies.

• Grants to spur the development of purchasing cooperatives that can reduce the cost of local government.

• Grants to conduct the research and produce the data necessary to drive decision-making about collaboration, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability.

• Grants that assist merging or consolidating entities with the daunting up-front costs that can serve as a barrier to effective consolidation.