21st Century Government Committee Final Report (PDF)

Excerpts from an Aug 21, 2007 Ben Konop blog posting

Aug 21, 2007 Blade story

I'll refer to lew's Feb 26, 2005 Toledo Talk posting, which defines unigov and regionalism.

It seems to me that the terms unigov and regionalism should not be used interchangeably. Government and media need to eliminate the confusion.

More from the Aug 21 Blade story:

• Customer service
• Joint purchasing between the county's government entities
• The county's technology infrastructure
• Commitment to joint services
• Locations of service operations
• Goal setting and outcome measurement
• Spending below the rate of inflation
• Addressing urban sprawl

More from the Blade story:

The "forced" part will happen later when the other communities don't agree with the Toledo focus.

Also from the Blade:

"Forced" is Toledo's Plan B. And again, the above talk is unigov, not regionalism as reported in the story. But some aspect of regionalism may have been mentioned in the committee's report as listed in the second bullet point below.

Committee suggestions as reported in the Blade story:

• Designate one county employee as a citizens’ advocate, who will monitor the county’s responsiveness to residents’ concerns.

• Create the Northwest Compact, in which all of northwest Ohio, and not just Lucas County, could opt into an organization that delivers government services. Governmental units in Michigan may also be allowed to join the compact.

• Form the Lucas County Intergovernmental Networking Cooperative, which would provide technology services for all county offices, plus interested townships, cities, school districts, and other units of government.

• Begin the Model Student Metro Government Project, in which 11th-grade students from each high school in Lucas County meet twice a month and attempt to solve real issues facing local governments within the framework of a metropolitan, or regionalized, government.

• Build the Regional Implementation Team, which at first will push the 21st century committee’s suggestions, but eventually could be the bridge for Lucas County to adopt a more regionalized form of government, referred to by some as unigov.

Mainly, the report's focus is on unigov and not regionalism. As far as I can tell in the PDF report file, "Lucas County" is mentioned dozens of times, while "Wood County" is mentioned twice, and "Lake Erie West" is never mentioned.

From the 2005 Toledo City Paper article about Lake Erie West:

Lucas County in 2050

In the PDF final report file was this long-ass fictional column by 80-something-year-old Keith Wilkowski. Note the final paragraph, which is only 40 years away. Why such a long wait?

---- start ----

August 1, 2050

LUCAS COUNTY RECEIVES NATIONAL AWARD AS MODEL COUNTY
Guest Columnist Keith Wilkowski

(WASHINGTON) Associated Press - The National Association of Counties (“NACo”)
today announced that Lucas County, Ohio has been selected to receive NACo’s highest
award, the Model County Award for the year 2050. Lucas County, located in Northwest
Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie, was selected from among over 200 counties nominated
for the prestigious award. Lucas County’s won the award on the basis of creatively
reshaping government to efficiently and effectively meet the needs of its citizens.

“Lucas County has reduced the overall cost of government to the citizens of the county
and to the business community through aggressive service consolidation programs” said
NACo President Andrea Adams. “Even more importantly, Lucas County’s annual citizen
satisfaction survey” (one of the county’s innovative measurement tools), “reveals that the
overwhelming majority of citizens perceive their local government as effective and
responsive to their needs,” Adams noted.

History of Lucas County’s Transformation

Lucas County first started down the reform road during the early part of the 21st
century. As citizens saw the benefits of consolidated services, tax-sharing programs and
the widespread deployment of technology, the consolidation movement caught on. Soon,
county, municipal and township officials were seeking office espousing the reform
platform. Historians have noted that Lucas County has a distinctive history of leading the
way in the area of government reform. The City of Toledo, the county seat for Lucas
County, was led by reform Mayor Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones at the start of the 20th
century. Building on their proud history in the area of government innovation and
reform, Lucas County leaders succeeded because they trusted that their constituents
would understand and embrace new ways of doing things.

“Today,” said Barry Brown, CEO of the 9 member County Consolidated Services Board
(formerly referred to as the Board of County Commissioners), “every citizen in Lucas
County can count on receiving a consistently high level of service without regard to
archaic boundary lines that historically separated the various political subdivisions.”

Over a period of about 5 years, starting in 2007, Lucas County began to merge its internal
operations at every opportunity, demonstrating that consolidated services did not equate
to inferior services. The movement had really started a year earlier when the University
of Toledo and the Medical University of Ohio merged to become the third largest
university in Ohio. “Not only did that merger ultimately result in significant cost
savings,” claimed Brown, “it proved that it was possible to better serve our constituencies
- students, staff, faculty and the community at-large – by employing a comprehensive
services approach.”

In addition to the positive example of the UT/MUO merger, some negative factors also
pushed Lucas County to change. “At the start of the century,” Brown explained, “Lucas
County residents were experiencing increasing taxes, fees and charges to support
infrastructure and provide services. At the same, taxpayers were seeing those services
scaled back”. Paying more; getting less. Increasingly, residents and community leaders
alike were of the view that something had to change.

As it turned out, the county was able to improve the quality of its services despite lower
personnel levels because it aggressively employed technology at every turn. For
example, nearly every government application, from applications for building permits to
employment applications and even applications for emergency housing assistance
initiated through community organizations like the YWCA are now submitted and
tracked electronically. The intelligent use of technology dramatically increased the speed
at which government was able to respond to the needs of its citizens. Just as importantly,
technology allowed Lucas County to access and use the vast data the government
accumulates so as to manage services and solve problems.

“Today it may seem hard to imagine,” Brown said, “but at the outset of the reform
movement, despite the existence of powerful technology in every government office, the
systems were largely incompatible with one another.” That Balkanized information
technology system was dramatically revised and improved through the leadership the
County Commissioners in empowering the County Data Processing Board to create a
uniform system. “We found that in many instances, we didn’t have to create new
vehicles to effect change, all we had to do was make effective use of the structures we
already had.” Brown noted.

Using Fire Services to Unite the Community and Ignite the Movement

During that initial period of consolidation, the county merged its 9-1-1,
Emergency Management and Emergency Medical Services systems, all then under the
control of the County Commissioners. They placed those departments under the
leadership of the County Sheriff’s Department, which became known as the Lucas
County Safety Services Department. That in turn sparked a move to consolidate fire
departments throughout Lucas County, first by cooperative contracts, and then by way of
formal mergers. Fire and safety services proved to be the proper vehicle for reform
because if there was one value the entire community could embrace, it was that people
and their property should be protected in emergencies no matter what part of the county
they lived in.

“The community did have some heated debates about how to equalize the tax structure so
that everyone paid their fair share for safety services,” local history Professor Connie
Conrad acknowledged, “but since we already had a number of countywide safety
programs, moving fire and first-responder EMS to that model was a step the community
was willing to take.” Almost as a demonstration of good faith to show that consolidated
services could be delivered at a lower cost, the County Commissioners reduced the
county’s general real estate tax millage by a small percentage. After that, Conrad said,
“the movement to consolidate services took on a life of its own.”

After the safety services consolidation, streamlining and merging other services was
almost easy, according to Lucas County officials. “Why did we have literally dozens of
grass cutting and property maintenance departments operating in one county?” asked Dan
Durham, Lucas County’s Director of Grounds Maintenance. “It just made no sense.”
Today, Durham’s one department directs operations for just about every government-
owned property in the county at the local, state and even federal levels. In fact, Grounds
Maintenance Department employees even care for the grounds of several large, semi-
public institutions under contracts with the Consolidated Services Board.

Tax Sharing and Community Planning To Discourage Sprawl

Like many counties at the start of this century, development in Lucas County was
sprawling ever outward even though its population level was stagnant. The population of
the largest city, Toledo, was dwindling, and the suburbs were experiencing their own
difficulties in building and maintaining infrastructure, paying for schools, and providing
essential services. “The bottom line was that continuing to spread development outward
amounted to substantial tax increase for the community as a whole,” said Elisa Edwards,
the Director of the University of Toledo Urban Affairs Center. County leaders
recognized that if the region was to make a comeback, people and businesses had to come
back to the central urban community.

The County Commissioners lobbied for necessary changes to state laws allowing them to
forge tax-sharing agreements between Toledo and the suburban communities. Those
agreements gave the suburbs a real investment in Toledo’s redevelopment. “Sprawl was
dividing us economically and racially,” said Edwards. “All the consolidations and
mergers in the universe weren’t going to advance our community if we didn’t address
sprawl.” Planning and economic development officials also put together an aggressive
program of incentives to encourage development inside the urban core and got suburbs to
buy-in with tax a tax-sharing program they regarded as fair.

“Maybe it was the community’s increasing recognition that sprawl was very much an
environmental concern, or maybe people finally got fed up with seeing their hard-earned
dollars used to create and maintain more and more public infrastructure,” observed Fred
Franklin, the County’s Public Information Officer. Whatever the motivation, “There’s no
doubt that Lucas County would not be receiving this award today if we hadn’t put the
brakes on sprawl and made Toledo’s redevelopment an integral part of Lucas County’s
plan for government reform.”

Today Toledo, just like Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a net exporter of tax dollars to
suburban communities. “At first, people thought that all development would continue to
be in the outlying areas and that the large city would simply take a share of suburban tax
dollars. But it has evolved to the point where Toledo now pays the suburbs because we
have substantial growth inside the urban core,” according to Franklin.

The Essential Role of Public Employees

Another essential element, all of the Lucas County representatives agree, was the
buy-in by public employees and their labor representatives. “All this streamlining and
consolidating might look great on paper,” said Gretchen Goodrich, the representative for
many of the public employee unions in Lucas County, “unless it’s your job being
streamlined and consolidated out of existence.” To ameliorate those concerns, Lucas
County entered into agreements that provided for reductions only through attrition and
voluntary buy-outs during the first three years following any consolidation. Workers
played a central role in identifying service inefficiencies and were rewarded for their
efforts. At least 50% of any cost savings resulting from the consolidation was dedicated
to the employees, either in increased wages or enhanced fringe benefits.

“It took some trust-building, that’s for sure,” Goodrich acknowledged, “but when we saw
that public employees were not facing big lay-offs and they were putting the savings from
the consolidations into the pockets of the employees, it really has worked for our
members.” Like the community at-large, public employees also saw that they were
falling victim to yearly budget cut-backs and reductions. “We were either going to help
craft workable solutions,” Goodrich said, “similar to those embraced in the automotive
industry, or we were going to continue to see our members suffer ad hoc and increasing
lay-offs. We choose to be the masters of our fate.”

The Tipping Point: City-County Merger

Despite all of the mergers and consolidations of departments and services, and the
cooperative service agreements between jurisdictions, it wasn’t until the year 2020 that
Lucas County really exploded onto the national scene. In that year, the community came
together to merge county government with its four major cities, Toledo, Sylvania,
Maumee and Oregon, as well as the smaller municipalities operating as villages. “People
realized that absent major structural changes in how we operated, we were ‘marching
toward fiscal obsolescence,’” a phrase used to describe Louisville, Kentucky before it
accomplished a similar merger between city and county government earlier in the
century, according to Harold Hanley, the President of the Regional Growth Partnership.
Taxes, assessments and charges were inching up, yet services were being scaled back.
“We had to change if we hoped to have any real chance to compete in the global
economy in the 21st century. A costly 19th century governmental structure stood as a real
impediment.”

Having experienced good results with the consolidation movement up to that point, the
community was ready to take the big step and formally merge county and city operations.
The electorate in each community had to vote whether to merge, and with a focused and
intelligent discussion, every community approved merger on the first vote. “We
succeeded in the merger effort in large part because the communities had the option to
maintain their independent existence as policy makers and to protect their unique rural
and suburban characters,” Hanley said.

Lucas County Today

Today, some thirty years after the city-county merger, Lucas County is
recognized as the national leader in unified service delivery systems. For example, one
agency provides all road maintenance services in Lucas County under the auspices of the
County Engineer, a professional position appointed by the Consolidated Services Board
from a list of qualified individuals. Similarly, the Board appoints qualified persons to fill the roles of
Coroner, Recorder, and Clerk of Courts. The Treasurer and the Auditor,
positions with financial responsibilities, remain independently elected posts.

The County Treasurer also has assumed the responsibility of administering all local
income taxes in addition to property taxes. Similarly, the county’s building inspection
department handles all inspection activities countywide. Police services, like fire and
EMS, fall under the Safety Services Department, and utilities are administered under the
independent regional Public Utility Authority with uniform rates for all citizens no matter
where one resides in Lucas County.

The “big picture” benefit to Lucas County as a result of consolidation and merger,
however, is not simply more efficient and cost effective government services. It turns out
that Lucas County has finally become that “business-friendly” community everyone talks
about, said Hanley, the RGP President. “It isn’t just marginally lower taxes that did it,”
Hanley said, though that certainly helps sell Lucas County as a place to do business. The
key factor, according to Hanley, is the region’s ability to immediately respond to
development proposals with one, unified agency applying a cohesive set of development
rules. “Knowing that you are not going to have to run from one agency to another, with
different rules depending on what side of the road your project is on”, made a huge
difference according to Hanley.

The proof, Hanley proudly noted, is in the economic development pudding:

Lucas County’s unemployment rate has been the lowest in the State of Ohio for four
years running and the county leads the State in the creation of new businesses and jobs.
“There is no doubt that Lucas County is indeed a model for the nation”, concluded NACo
President Adams. “This Model County Award is richly deserved”.

And as for Lucas County officials, they’re not resting on their laurels. Next on their
agenda: consolidated service agreements with Michigan communities to the north and
Wood County communities to the south.

--- end fiction ----