GLUE: Great Lakes Urban Exchange

A new organization is taking regionalism to another level. GLUE, the Great Lakes Urban Exchange, is fostering conversation within and between cities in the Great Lakes Economic Region in order to foster cooperation and innovative strategies for revitalization:

Want to take the “rust” out of “Rustbelt”? Are you an advocate? A neighbor? A voter? A dot connector? The Great Lakes Urban Exchange needs your help to answer the question: what’s right and what’s wrong about my post-industrial city?

Join the movement for a “Rustbelt” Renaissance here on GLUEspace and via GLUE’s offline activities in your sticky city. Become a member, tell your story, and help us collect, cross-pollinate, and replicate good ideas. Welcome to the mega-regional family.

For more information, visit www.gluespace.org and attend a sticky cities meeting.

Regional Cooperation and Economic Development

A recent conference in Youngstown, Ohio, brought together planning and development professionals from each of three cities, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Youngstown, to discuss common challenges and opportunities for regional collaboration. The keynote speaker, John Austin, formerly of the Great Lakes Economic Initiative at the Brookings Institution, provided a look at the Great Lakes Region’s economy and how economic development can come from regional coordination.

Group talks of boosting Great Lakes economy
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Vindicator
Youngstown, Ohio

Elizabeth Township Governance to Change

You may have not read the recent story in the Post-Gazette about a man in Elizabeth Township who has proposed to decrease the number of township commissioners from 7 to 5 and move them from elected by ward to elected at large. You may not have read this story because you think that it has no relevance to you. You may be wrong.

Elizabeth Township, located south of McKeesport on the Youghiogheny River, had a population of 13,839 in 2000 (at the time of the last census). That makes Elizabeth Township smaller than some City of Pittsburgh neighborhoods (i.e. Squirrel Hill, Brookline and Shadyside).

Yet, in the current proposal for city-county consolidation, Elizabeth Township doesn’t have to change at all. It will keep on with its commissioners and its independent citizenry while the City of Pittsburgh, with 334,563 people, will be eliminated and rolled into the county.

Currently, Elizabeth has one commissioner for every 1,977 citizens. That’s a whole lot of government. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh has one Council Member for every 37,174 people. If the goal of reform is efficiency, as it is stated in arguments for city-county consolidation, which municipality discussed here is more efficient and which one should be considered for consolidation?

Is there any reason to merge the city and county? (CP article)

Combination Schlock

Is there any reason to merge the city and county?

By Adam Fleming

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl left the ballroom and entered a crowd of cameras and reporters after testifying at a May 28 hearing convened by a panel of state representatives visiting from Harrisburg. Inside the hearing, seated next to county Chief Executive Dan Onorato, he had coolly presented his case for a massive overhaul of local government — turning the 250-year-old city of Pittsburgh into an “urban services district” within a merged city/county government.

“One inevitable conclusion that we must reach together as a community is that we can no longer afford the status quo,” Ravenstahl told the legislators. “We must change if we are to grow again.” Read More …

To consolidate or not to consolidate?

A better question is: what are we consolidating? The answer to that is unclear in a 2004 poll of Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project members referenced in testimony before last week’s hearing of the Pennsylvania House Urban Affairs Committee. The terms municipal consolidation and regionalism can have multiple meanings; the most important implication of this fact is that CITY-COUNTY CONSOLIDATION IS NOT OUR ONLY OPTION.

Regionalism is the governance of a large geographical area. There are several different types of regionalism, such as fiscal (e.g. tax-base sharing), functional (e.g. shared services) or structural (e.g. consolidation). All of these types of regionalism can have benefits for the geographic area(s) they serve, depending on the details of the specific arrangement.

The current proposal for regionalism in Pittsburgh is structural regionalism that would consolidate the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County governments. The practical implication of this is that the City of Pittsburgh’s government would cease to exist. This presents some concerns, mainly for City residents. First, a strategy has not yet been identified to ensure equitable minority representation in the resulting government. Second, an Urban Services District is proposed to protect the County from the City’s current pension deficit; within the Urban Services District (coterminous with current City boundaries), residents will pay something additional to fund the pensions of urban service workers (e.g. police and fire). A concern for the County is that the City’s Act 47 status may come with it and therefore transfer to the County.

The most prominent stated benefit of City-County consolidation of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County is cost savings. When we think of the top priority of our city, county or region, is cost savings the thing that first comes to mind? More often than efficient government, economic development- the creation of jobs- and population- the attraction and retention of people, especially young ones, are the topics of urgency when considering how to revive the region. What we seem to be calling for is economic growth not smaller local government. How does the current proposal promote economic development in Allegheny County? No differently than it currently does because the competition between local municipalities will still exist. This competition is spurred by differences in approaches to development such land use planning and zoning codes. This type of fragmentation actually makes the region as a whole less competitive.

This has been a problem for Louisville, which completed city-county consolidation in 2003. An important consideration when making a comparison to Louisville or other prior consolidations is that Allegheny County is more fragmented than all of them, with 130 total municipalities. Additionally, note that Louisville is the only city-county consolidation to occur in the last 50 or so years and that region faces several challenges in the wake of this change.

The Pittsburgh Region needs real regionalism. This could eventually be some sort of consolidation, perhaps groups of or even all of the municipalities within Allegheny County. However, we can get started today by pursuing functional regionalism in the form of municipal cooperation. Cooperation can result in cost savings as well as increased investment; cooperation results in more leverage for public and private investment.

We don’t need city-county consolidation, we need cooperation. We don’t need change for the sake of change, we need progress.