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It's time to reinvent local government |
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Sunday, 06 September 2009 |
Remember back in 1993 when then-Vice President Al Gore set about reinventing government?
Well, he never really got that done, but that is exactly what we need to try here in Rhode Island: throw out the current system altogether and start from scratch.
Although God knows that state government is sorely in need of a re-invention, let’s start today with municipal government, our cities and towns.
We hear a lot about regionalization and economies of scale, but that is just diddling around the edges. Regionalization isn’t really going to get us very far or save us very much money. Yes, it might be satisfying to slash the ranks of various local bureaucrats — school superintendents, administrators of this and that, along with their staffs — from 39 to a more manageable number, but that is not the answer.
What we have to do is scrap the whole structure of how we administer local services now and begin anew. But as former Republican Rep. Nick Gorham — who was bounced from office for proposing a plan to combine several towns in the western part of the state into an entity called Westconnaug — can tell you, that can be pretty tricky political business. People love the communities they live in, identify with them, and don’t want them taken away.
Fine, we will leave the cities and towns alone. If you live in Lincoln now, you can continue to live in Lincoln. Providence residents will keep their same mailing addresses. And if you are out in the boonies of Foster, a Fosterite you may remain.
It’s just that those municipalities will no longer do anything but serve as mailing addresses.
We can join most of the other states in the union in establishing county governments. I don’t mean the counties we have now, those aren’t really worth anything and nobody really pays attention to them, except the court system, which observes them in a half-assed sort of way.
But let’s create real counties built around the needs of the communities they are intended to serve. Counties would run the schools, the police and fire departments, public works (streets and highways; rubbish collection; snowplowing; water and sewers; planning and zoning) if a city or town does a job now, the county would take it over.
The municipal departments would dissolve, and an entirely new structure would be substituted in its place.
Can you start to see the value of this? Instead of being stuck with the structure of municipalities as they gradually and arbitrarily grew, some from as early as the 1600s, you could start with a blank slate and hire cops and firefighters and school teachers and road crews as they could be most efficiently used in the 21st Century. You wouldn’t have to literally level everything and construct new buildings — we can use many (but certainly not all) of the existing schoolhouses and fire stations and public works garages, but if it would be useful to build new centralized, we could do that, too.
The union-bashers out there would certainly like the idea that the new counties would have to hire their own personnel. Certainly existing municipal employees, with their valuable expertise and experience could be given hiring preference, but you would only hire as many as you need to staff the county police force, the county schools, etc. And, because all those employees would be working for a new employer, new labor contracts would have to be bargained from scratch in each county, perhaps eliminating many provisions now derided as union boondoggles. (That is my least favorite part of my own idea, especially on Labor Day, but if you are going to make an omelet…)
Colleges, hospitals, airports and similar facilities would make their own payment-in-lieu-of-taxes arrangements with whichever county they are located in.
With that in mind, you would want to set up the counties to fit the requirements of the different parts of the state they would serve.
We could start with an urban county, combining cities and towns of similar make-up and similar needs. It could include Pawtucket, Woonsocket, Central Falls, Cumberland, Lincoln, Providence, and North Providence.
Another grouping would be quasi-suburban bedroom type communities. I would suggest North Smithfield, Smithfield, Johnston, Cranston, Warwick, West Warwick and East Greenwich.
Then you would have shoreline communities: East Providence, Barrington Warren, Bristol Tiverton, Little Compton, Newport, Middletown, Portsmouth, Narragansett, North and South Kingstown, Jamestown and New Shoreham (which would be renamed Block Island because who the hell calls it New Shoreham anyway).
Then there is the rural western part of the state: Burrillville, Glocester, Foster, Scituate, Coventry, West Greenwich, Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond, Charlestown and Westerly. (Just don’t call it Westconnaug.)
The residents of each county could elect county commissioners the way we elect city and town councilors now, and while I might lean toward electing a county executive (similar to a mayor), I can also see an argument in favor of the commissioners hiring an executive (similar to today’s town managers). Cities and towns could keep their mayors and town administrators, if they wanted, but with municipalities providing no services, the jobs would be largely ceremonial.
With communities organized into these more sensible groupings, rather than the 39 higgledy-piggledy entities we have now, state aid could be distributed far more effectively and targeted so it could be put to the best use.
There would be no walls around the counties, they could work together when cooperation would be effective.
The urban county that would have facilities and programs for urban area, could work cooperatively with, say, residents of West Warwick, who might need something their county doesn’t have. The shoreline county could work when needed with East Greenwich or Westerly on problems or opportunities they might have in common.
So how do we fund all of this? That is the real beauty part, the crown jewel of this plan: we would also have to start the revenue side of local budgets from square one. That means, if we are smart, eliminating the property tax — getting rid of it, killing it, driving a stake through its rancid heart and burying it deep in the Johnston Landfill. (See! We could still keep the name of the Johnston Landfill, because it would still be in Johnston, even though Johnston would be part of Quasi-Suburban Bedroom County.)
We could fund county government with a county income tax, probably one that piggybacks on the state tax. Businesses as well as individuals would pay tax on the money that actually comes in, not pony up some artificial levy that has no relation to their ability to pay.
Retirees would no longer be forced from the homesteads where they raised their families because they are on a fixed income and can’t pay their property tax bill. Businesses that have a tough year where they barely break even or even lose money (like, for example, 2009 perhaps) would not get a knock on the door from the taxman, saying, “sorry you didn’t make any money this year, but you still have this big property tax nut you have to come up with or go out of business.”
If, like Governor Carcieri, you don’t think local communities should get much aid from the state, you could let people deduct their county taxes from their state income tax so the counties could be self-sustaining. If the state doesn’t provide a lot of aid to local operations, then it can stick all its mandates where the sun don’t shine, too.
Counties could be the answer to a lot of our gripes, about inefficient services, taxes and, of course, those damn unions, a Rhode Island remade for the 21st Century.
The General Assembly just loves its study commissions, I would humbly suggest that when they return in October (or whenever), they appoint one to study the concept of counties with the goal of getting serious about it next January.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 20 September 2009 )
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