The Post-Gazette editorializes that Pittsburgh and Allegheny County should merge. It’s a worn entreaty that rears its ugly self on an all-too-regular basis.
From the editorial:
“With 130 municipalities, this is the most governmentally fragmented county in America. Meanwhile the county of about 1.2 million people is anchored by a city of only 300,000 — a tax- and population-base too small to effectively serve an urban center upon which the economic health of the rest of the region depends.”
So those who have fled to the ‘burbs to avoid the long growing rot of the urban core must be recaptured and held hostage to fix up everything, eh?
Two years ago, writing at Governing.com, urban analyst Aaron M. Renn reminded the obvious: “There are trade-offs to any governance approach.
“But,” he stressed, “the big-box style of governance that’s considered to be ‘best practice,’ as exemplified by city-county mergers, has real downsides that are seldom discussed.”
And as Brian Peteritas wrote, also at Governing.com, a decade earlier:
“(I)t turns out that consolidations rarely save money. In fact, for the majority of citizens directly affected in these cases, consolidation has meant higher taxes and spending.
“Some cities consolidated because a larger government could improve local infrastructure. This has usually meant new debt and new taxes to repay that debt. Others offered generous pensions and health-care benefits to employees pushed out in the consolidation, thus saddling the new government with expensive legacy costs,” Peteritas noted.
To be fair, the P-G editorial, this time, is not advocating for a wholesale combined city-county subsumption of Allegheny County’s 100-plus separate government jurisdictions. And it makes a point of the value of a countywide consolidation of, say, refuse collection (which, by the way, clearly should be private in toto).
But just as clearly, the better place to start “reform” would be for the City of Pittsburgh to first get its own house in order through a serious right-sizing and public services contracting-out/privatization effort.
Only then should the county, with its own maladies that number in the many, even begin to entertain discussions about any operations consolidations. If then even.
It was 20 years ago that Allegheny Institute scholars Jake Haulk and Frank Gamrat took aim at the usual bum-rushers for pushing a merged Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.
It was an insightful skewering in the June 11, 2006, Post-Gazette that the Ph.D. economists stated the sound and reasoned case against a city-county merger:
“The reason for the city’s and county’s dismal growth, and for that matter the region’s as a whole, is not fragmented government. The problems can be found in the pervasive unionism that determines the business climate as well as a regulatory climate that treats businesses as villains and unions as heroes.
“Merging city and county governments will not spur economic growth, although it may improve the ease with which corporate wealthfare is handed out.”
Tragically, those dismal growth, population and jobs metrics continue to this day.
Concluded Haulk and Gamrat all those years ago, a conclusion that remains evergreen:
“Instead of coming up with innovative ways to improve the city and help pull it out of financial distress, [merger proponents] continue the tradition of confusing activity with progress. They see merging the city with the county as a way of spreading the city’s financial problems over a larger population.
“As the president of the Fraternal Order of Police noted in a Post-Gazette article about the proposal, having the city ask you to merge would be like ‘your poor, drunk uncle was going to come and live with you.’ County residents are wise enough to avoid that disaster,” Haulk and Gamrat wrote.
Two decades later, the poor, drunk uncle lurks in the wings still, hoping finally to grab the spotlight. But, then as now and as always, Uncle Lurk should be shown the exit, stage left.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
