Save local government by eliminating local governments - OCRegister

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California is finally getting the local government apocalypse it needs.

I love local government. In most places, it’s the most democratic, participatory, and effective level of government, and it deserves to be the most powerful and best-funded.

But in California, local governments are too weak and small to be effective. Why? There are simply too many of them. And so, for the past decade, I have pined publicly for an “extinction event” that would kill off thousands of California local governments. Now COVID-19 may fulfill my awful wish.

Heartless as it may seem, the only way to save local government in California is to eliminate local governments.

Our ship of state is barnacled with governments. In addition to the state’s hundreds of agencies, we have 58 counties, 482 cities, 1037 school districts, 73 community college districts, and nearly 5,000 special districts, governing everything from mosquitoes to cemeteries.

Taken together, all these governments resemble nothing so much as San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House, with an incoherent design and overabundance of rooms that produce feelings of frustration and futility.

Citizens are represented by so many different governments that neither they, nor our shrinking media, can monitor agencies’ behavior. With so little scrutiny, our local governments routinely produce fiscal disasters—from corruption to unsustainable retirement benefits. And instead of solving regional problems like transportation or housing, local governments get in each other’s way.

The resulting public distrust has led Californians to limit the powers of local officials—especially the power to tax, via Prop 13 and related measures. Those limits, in turn, has made our local governments some of the weakest in the U.S.—and centralized California power at the state level. COVID-19 deepens this dysfunctional dynamic. Our local governments lack the resources or expertise to decide how to respond to the crisis by themselves; Sacramento makes the big decisions.

And with financial support slow in arriving from the federal government, local governments are already cutting services and laying off employees. Local bankruptcies are suddenly on the horizon.

In all this pain lies great possibility. The local apocalypse is so big that every local government may need a bailout. But there are simply too many governments, and too little money, to save them all. In this moment, we must two enormous changes in our local governments.

First, we need fewer governments—that’s the extinction I wanted. Second, we must make remaining local governments more powerful and resilient, so they can solve our many regional problems in good times, and hold up in future crises.

Let’s start by allowing California citizens to establish regional councils with power to consolidate our local governments.

They could start by folding our thousands of special districts into existing city and county governments. Fiscally weak local governments could be merged into stronger ones. It also would make sense to combine small, contiguous counties, cities, and school districts.

My home county of Los Angeles, with 88 cities, is ripe for this. Do we really need both an El Monte and a South El Monte, a Covina and a West Covina, a Pasadena and a South Pasadena? Artesia, Cerritos, and Hawaiian Gardens already share one school district—why not a single City Hall?

To avoid having newly combined cities become larger versions of our current local weaklings, consolidation must be accompanied by restoring local government power—above all, the power for local officials to tax. Such power would lead to better services and more stable public employment, and enable stronger regional cooperation on transportation, public health, economic development—and disaster response.

Stronger local governments would be more democratic and accountable—there is more incentive for watchdogs to emerge when governments can reach deeper into our wallets. These newly consolidated governments also could close outdated departments, and produce more technology-based services.

As former Santa Monica city manager Rick Cole told the Planning Report, “If we were starting from scratch today, we would design a government that looked more like the iPhone than the rotary phone.”

One blessing of this pandemic is that we can start from scratch, and redesign our nation-state. The politics are favorable, too. The statewide interests that have protected centralized state power—our big labor unions and corporations—are also reeling from the effects of COVID-19. Any bailouts for them should be conditioned on their support for restoring local government to power.

The local apocalypse is here—whether we wanted it or not. Let’s make the most of it.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

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