The editorial page of the NJ features a piece from John Sweeney that attempts to advocate for Metropolitan Government for Wilmington and New Castle County. He also takes the opportunity to blame the public sector unions and Democrats for why it won’t work here. Let’s take this apart abit so we can see how Delaware’s newspaper of record is failing its readers again.
Metropolitan Government is shorthand for the merger of Wilmington and New Castle County as a way to get some additional efficiency from these two governments. The first I heard of it was when the city had its financial crisis back in 2003/2004. Metropolitan Government was proposed at that time as a way to save the city — merge it with the County, reduce the duplication of services, expand the interests of both entities and make it easier to market a region rather than standalone units. There were probably more reasons for this, but the idea was pretty firmly rejected by both City and County people. I went to alot of debates and political events that year and I saw no residents who spoke *for* Metropolitan Government.
Stepping back abit more, the idea of merging municipal governments is something that Jon Corzine tried to promote in NJ, with little success. Governors in NY, Maine, Iowa and other states have been working on promoting government consolidations (sometimes municipalities, sometimes school districts) with limited success. In spite of providing ways to streamline a consolidation process and even providing some incentives to cover some of the costs, municipal and school district mergers are a very tough sell everywhere. Longtime readers here will note that discussions of consolidating Delaware’s school districts have people coming out of the woodwork to defend one thing.
Home Rule. Home Rule is the biggest obstacle to implementing municipal consolidations everywhere. If you follow NJ at all, you know that there is a new incorporated area approximately every 1.5 square miles or so. All of them have their own governments, providing their own services and having almost 500 different police departments, administrations, and other city overhead is probably the biggest reason why New Jersians have such a massive tax burden. While they all want that tax burden to be reduced, they aren’t especially interested in giving up their own governments and services. And it is a tough sell. Princeton Borough and Princeton Township merged last year after trying for more than a decade. These two municipalities aren’t even that different from each other. But they did work at small consolidations along the way — parking, library, volunteer fire department, among others — making it easier finally for the residents of both areas to vote to merge. Other NJ municipalites are thinking of their own mergers, but the business of Home Rule — the ability to fund and control your own services — is pretty powerful. The cities of Cherry Hill and Merchantville have been exploring a consolidation and much of the pushback has been coming from Cherry Hill residents who see schools in the area close to Merchantville being overwhelmed.
There’s also identity — people strongly identify with the places they live. And sometimes negatively — as in identifying with NOT living in Wilmington (or, for some of us, NOT living in the suburbs). It is hard to ask people who see themselves are a vital part of one community to change that identification.
The NJ piece identifies unions and Democrats as ground zero of the opposition to Metropolitan Government here — completely bypassing the issues of Home Rule and Identity that have been the majority experience in many other places. The places pushing for municipal or school district consolidations are Blue States, Red State and Purple states — and every last one of them finds that is it awfully hard to convince voters to give up the governments they rely on. Even people who preach smaller government will embrace the government that is closest to them, and point fingers at all of the other people who need to give up their government. Certainly public sector unions have something to lose in consolidations — some jobs will be lost as departments merge. But one of the real challenges of a consolidated government is consolidating those unions. For instance, the WPD and NCCPD pay scales are quite different (NCCPD pays more) — which pay scale gets adopted? The odds are good that while some jobs will be lost, the jobs that are left will have higher pay, because the county typically pays more than the city.
How do you deal with the city’s wage tax? How do you deal with the rules that effectively limit the city’s ability to grow on its own? How would a consolidation effect the other incorporated areas in the County? These and alot more questions have to be dealt with successfully in order to craft a narrative that will show residents of both areas that this is a good thing. But the NJ wants to ditch the complexity of the real and perceived problems with a City County consolidation, in favor of a simple blaming of unions and Democratic politicians. Add to that the ironic twist that they do all of this by complaining of a lack of leadership for this issue.
Getting to Metropolitan Government is a massive task (and I’m neither pro or con the idea at this point) and it is a bigger one than unions or Democratic politicians. I’d bet that if you were to hold a referendum on this in November, this idea would go down in ignominious defeat — because neither community wants this. Leadership would indeed conceptualize this task in a way that tells City and County communities why this should be compelling to them. A newspaper genuinely interested in the betterment of both communities would be calling for leadership to navigate this complexity, rather than lazily pointing fingers at the least of the challenges for this.