Proposed County Dissolution Is Reverse of National Trend

As ideas for revamping Orange County government fly across Civic Center Plaza, perhaps none is more appealing to outraged taxpayers than the one proffered last week by Supervisor Marian Bergeson: Eliminate the county as we know it.

After all, it was county government that lost $1.7 billion on risky investments. It is the county whose unprecedented bankruptcy filing has put city and school projects on indefinite hold. The county has the bruised Wall Street reputation, the endless line of begging creditors and the stacks of litigation piling up in court.

But Bergeson’s germinating proposal--which would require cooperation of the county’s 31 cities and a state constitutional amendment--runs counter to the trend in government reform around the nation.

Despite citizen devotion to local control, the growing movement is toward consolidation, in which counties and cities combine to remove excess layers of bureaucracy and increase efficiency through economies of scale.

The one state that has abolished county governments, Connecticut, has since replaced them with weak regional councils, and continues to search for ways to provide key services across city boundaries.

“I can’t think of anything more ludicrous than getting rid of Orange County,” said University of Connecticut Prof. David Walker, who specializes in local government. “To get rid of the county provides no answers. The issue is, ‘Who’s going to handle it?’ The State of California is not going to assume regional functions for Orange County. The cities don’t have the geography to do it.

“Getting rid of regionalism is crazy,” Walker added. “It flabbergasts me.”

Even devotees of consolidation--which, in effect, abolishes counties by combining them with individual cities--shake their heads at the prospects of removing the county umbrella in a place like Orange County, which lacks a defining major city.

“In my judgment, what you should do is create one government and eliminate all the cities, all of them,” said Cecil Branstetter, an attorney who pioneered the consolidation of Nashville, Tenn., and surrounding Davidson County three decades ago. Bergeson’s proposal, Branstetter noted, “would be the opposite. You would probably just create a little more chaos.”

The United States has 3,043 counties, covering every place except the District of Columbia and a few niches of Alaska.

Rhode Island and Connecticut use counties merely as geographic markers. In other parts of the Northeast, their sole functions are to run courts and jails.

But in Maryland and Virginia, the counties run the schools. Further south and in much of the West, county governments supersede city officials, presiding over the uses of vast areas of land and wielding more authority at the state level. Twenty of the 50 states use counties to deliver welfare programs.

Their powers and responsibilities range from cleaning streets to condemning criminals to death.

“As you go from state to state, the responsibilities of counties do differ because counties are the creations of the state government,” said Tom Goodman, spokesman for the National Assn. of Counties. “They’re really apples and oranges.”

California is carved up into 58 counties that run the courts and jails, provide health care and social services to the poor, collect taxes, pay bills and make investments for local agencies, build roads and run buses, process trash, keep up parks and handle elections.

But with the unincorporated areas that typically rely on county government for basic services being eaten up by new and expanding cities, reformers throughout the state are now pondering the appropriate role of counties.

Bergeson would abolish the Board of Supervisors she joined in January, replacing it with a part-time, appointed “Orange Regional Services Authority” and a countywide mayor elected to four-year terms. The authority and mayor would run programs required and funded by the state, such as criminal prosecution and punishment, health care, social services, flood control, parks, trash, water and transportation.

Cities would take over all police functions as well as responsibility for planning, zoning, housing and libraries. The state would run the county treasury and investment operations and take back responsibility for elections, education, courts and taxes from the county.

Bergeson’s staff estimates that the plan, dubbed “Orange County 2001,” could save $140 million a year.

“It’s an unfortunate generalization about simply abolishing county governments, and saying, ‘OK, they’re gone.’ The world doesn’t work that way,” said Fred Silva, executive secretary of California’s Constitutional Revision Commission, which is examining the role of local government.

“The question is, ‘How do we provide areawide services?’ What you don’t want to do is have counties provide state-required services and local services. That is the nub of the problem,” Silva said.

Similar dilemmas have prompted creative thinking about the role of the county in other parts of the nation.

There are currently 28 consolidated city-county governments throughout the country: Nantucket, Mass., population 6,000, combined with its surrounding county in 1821; in the 1960s, several cities of half a million people converted their governments.

San Francisco is the lone example of consolidation in California--it has been that way since 1856. Sacramento voters rejected a consolidation plan several years ago.

The most well-known are Nashville and Davidson County, which joined forces in 1962; Jacksonville, Fla., which combined with Duval County in 1967, and Indianapolis-Marion County, which united in 1969.

Richard Martin helped author Jacksonville’s city-county charter, expanding the city from 73 to 473 square miles, equalizing the tax base and service levels, and erasing the jobs of officials whose positions were duplicated within the new city-county. A string of government scandals, ailing schools and a flight to the suburbs prompted the move.

Martin said the merger has simplified things in his home of half a century.

“If we want to build a road that runs for miles we just build it. We don’t have to go through townships and boards forever, asking permission,” he said. “We’re in a better position today than almost any city in the world to take care of ourselves.

“We’ve got plenty of problems, and we’re not solving some of them,” he acknowledged. “But that comes down to leadership. We have jurisdictional power that other cities can only drool over.”

In Nashville, the consolidation replaced a 43-person county executive board and 21-member City Council with a 35-seat group that now governs both.

Branstetter estimates that the city’s taxes would have grown three times higher than they are today without consolidation. Schools, parks and health services have all been combined. The only remnant of the old county system is the elected sheriff, whose duties have been cut back so far the office is little more than a desk.

“You’ve had the elimination of all the competition (for state funding) and all the controversy over the turf battles,” he reflected. “It’s much cheaper. It’s more efficient. The whole county is perceived as part of one government entity.”

Though consolidation is the most popular way of abolishing counties, some see the movement as strengthening the county government and just changing its name.

A more accurate parallel to the Orange County proposal may actually be in Connecticut, where the weak counties duplicated services provided by cities, towns and villages until they were written out of existence in 1960.

Established in 1662 as judicial regions, Connecticut’s counties once built roads, licensed taverns and ran the courts and jails. But by the mid-20th Century, most of those duties had been taken over by city, state and federal government agencies.

“One of the reasons we abandoned it is because the counties didn’t do much,” said Morton Tenzer, who recently retired as director of the University of Connecticut’s Institute of Urban Research and is now teaching at Catholic University. “They disappeared and nobody missed them, because they really didn’t do anything.”

But now some wonder whether Connecticut made the right move.

A pending court case asks that schools be integrated across city lines. The weak regional councils are struggling to establish various environmental initiatives. And inequality between impoverished cities and neighboring bedroom communities screams to some a need for integrated government.

“If the counties existed now as viable entities, they would offer something that’s already in place to help us regionalize various functions,” State Historian Christopher Collier said. “The absence of counties makes it more difficult to consider certain kinds of regional solutions.”

Neither Bergeson nor the Constitutional Commission is looking too closely at the experience of these consolidated cities or other states because, they say, the politics of California are unique.

“We like overlap and we like lots of elections. We like local control, but we also like to have many answers to the question of who provides the service,” Silva said of his home state. “It’s not very efficient, but the politics of California have never been driven by efficiency--it’s been driven by: ‘Let’s elect more people.’ ”

Leon Williams, a former San Diego County supervisor and president of the California State Assn. of Counties, agreed.

“You could operate a very small state without counties,” he reasoned, but “California is the size of Great Britain, or bigger. Many of our counties are bigger than many states. You try to run that out of Sacramento and you would have, I suspect, more problems than we have now.”

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