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

ISBN-13: 9780765609410 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 344 str.

Jered B. Carr; Richard C. Feiock

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Part I: Consolidation and Progressive Reform; 1. Perspectives on City-County Consolidation and Its Alternatives, Jered B. Carr and Richard C. Feiock; 2. Consolidation as a Local Government Reform: Why City-County Consolidation Is an Enduring Issue, Suzanne M. Leland and Gary A. Johnson; 3. Do Consolidation Entrepreneurs Make a Deal with the Devil? Richard C. Feiock; Part II: Consolidation and Its Alternatives; 4. Issues of Scale and Transaction Costs in City-County Consolidation, Allen B. Brierly; 5. Annexation as a Form of Consolidation: An Analysis of Central Core City Boundary Expansion in the United States During the Twentieth Century, Allen B. Brierly; 6. Interlocal Agreements as an Alternative to Consolidation, Kurt Thurmaier and Curtis Wood; 7. Special Districts: An Alternative to Consolidation, Barbara Coyle McCabe; Part III: The Politics of City-County Consolidation; 8. Revolutionary Local Constitutional Change: A Theory of the Consolidation Process, Linda S. Johnson; 9. The Politics of City-County Consolidation: Findings from a National Survey, Jered B. Carr, Richard C. Feiock, and Bethany G. Sneed; 10. Local Government Amalgamation from the Top-Down, Raymond A. Rosenfeld and Laura A. Reese; 11. Making the Case for (and Against) City-County Consolidation: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Linda S. Johnson and Jered B. Carr; 12. Institutional Choice, Collective Action, and Governance, Richard C. Feiock and Jered B. Carr

O autorze

Jered B. Carr is assistant professor of political science at Wayne State University. He has written extensively on city-county consolidation, municipal annexation, and the formation of special district governments. He earned his Ph.D. in public administration from the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. In 2001 the American Political Science Association gave him the Leonard D. White Award for his dissertation on local government boundary change. This annual award recognizes a dissertation written in the field of public administration. Richard C. Feiock is professor and Ph.D. program director at the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. His work on local government and governance is widely published and he directs the Devoe Moore Center’s Program in Local Governance.