The History of County Government
Part III.
Since many of local government’s new pressures in the postwar era in fact reflected regional conditions—in areas from transportation to environmental protection—many leaders advocated a strongly regional approach to solving these problems.
There were long established precedents for multi-government cooperation in many areas. Regional planning commissions in some states dated to the early years of the century, and numerous metropolitan areas with extensive transit, bridge, and highway networks managed these networks through independent, multi-jurisdiction authorities.
But explicit, ongoing regional cooperation in planning and program implementation was a relatively new idea.
The 1950s saw several important initiatives, in which county governments and leaders played key roles. Wayne County, Michigan, for example (including the city of Detroit) took the lead in working with leaders from six surrounding counties to create a Supervisors’ Inter-County Committee that grew into the Southwest Michigan Council of Governments. This was among the earliest Council of Governments (COG) efforts in the United States, though the movement spread quickly.
The Detroit initiative was followed by COG efforts in greater New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, southern California, Atlanta and a number of other areas. The COG strategy gained supporters so rapidly, in fact, that a national meeting of COG leaders could be held in 1960, leading to the creation of the National Service to Regional Councils (NSRC). In areas such as transportation and housing, county leaders lobbied Congress to recognize these regional councils and include them in grant-making and other forms of federal financial aid.
The federal government had been willing to do just that since at least 1954, when that year’s Housing Act allowed the federal government to fund up to two-thirds of a county road project if the administration “finds that planning and plans for such county will be coordinated with the program of comprehensive planning, if any, which is being carried out for the metropolitan area of which the county is a part.”
Late in the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower launched a new effort to define exactly how different governments needed to work together to address common concerns. Eisenhower established the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR). But ACIR, as originally proposed, included representatives from city and state governments but none who could speak for county government interests. Led by NACo, county government advocates secured legislation requiring that three places on the 26-member panel be provided for county officials.
Working together, the city and county representatives were able to secure the election of their own first choice as ACIR’s executive director. By pressing their concerns on the national stage, and simultaneously working hard to build their own capacity for cooperation, county and city governments greatly accelerated the move to regional planning.
Throughout the coming decades, Congress and the federal executive departments would encourage this trend by delegating more and more responsibility to regional bodies and offering them access to more and more funding. Legislation often called for applications for federal aid to be reviewed and commented on by regional planning agencies. These regional planning bodies soon became a central element of the process of applying for federal grants. These grants, in turn, rapidly grew into the chief source of revenue for regional councils.
By the mid-1970s, more than 600 councils of governments and regional planning commissions were in action all over the country.
This broad trend challenged county governments to maintain not only their independence but their growing importance as the unit of government closest to the people in a given locality. When ACIR organized a “Second Constitutional Convention” in 1975, NACo President Conrad Fowler warned against ceding too much power and authority to regional bodies.
“In a real sense the future of county government hinges on whether we accept the fragmented delivering servicing strategy of the technocrats, specialists and single program functionaries, or whether we fully recognize the merit of the traditional argument for democratic government,” Fowler said.
“We must accept the proposition that authoritative, accountable, multipurpose governments are needed between the states and municipalities (and) reject the notion that a maze of regional mechanisms is a respective and responsible approach to handling the mounting planning, financial and servicing problems facing practically all of our urban and rural substate regions.”
Another strategy adopted in some regions was consolidation of city governments with those of adjacent or surrounding counties. Of course, such consolidations had been seen before, most notably the combination of five counties into New York City in 1898. But they had been quite scarce. Between 1962 and 1972 11 such mergers took place, more than had occurred in the entire previous 150 years.
Many consolidations took place in relatively rural settings: Carson City and Ormsby County, Nevada, for instance, and the city of Juneau, Alaska with its surrounding Juneau Borough. But others involved major cities. Jacksonville, Florida, for instance, consolidated with Duval County, and similar mergers were accomplished in Nashville, Indianapolis, and Columbus, Georgia. Today there are 34 consolidated city county governments. The most recent in a large metropolitan area is the merger of Louisville City and Jefferson County, KY.
Advocates of consolidation have argued that services are improved, federal and state aid has been increased, and major economies have been achieved through centralized purchasing and financial services. Yet difficulties remain, and many proposed consolidations have been rejected by voters, often concerned about the equity and responsiveness of the new government.
The Rise of the Urban County
At the end of WW II as soldiers returned from overseas, prosperity returned to the country. The military jeep was retrofitted to a sporty family car and the Levitt Brothers build the first suburban development in Levitttown, NY. Prior to WWII, the vast majority of the population lived in cities, but with the development of suburbs and subdivisions the exodus began. Many of these newly build suburbs were in unincorporated areas in the counties because of their easier zoning and building regulations and the availability of land. As the exodus grew, people moving from the cities to the suburbs carried with them their expectation of city-style urban service delivery. They began to demand this level of service from county governments that were not accustomed to providing them. As counties scrambled to respond, they raised taxes, began regulating land use and planning.
Revenue sharing
County government’s campaign to preserve its own place in the hierarchy of public administration got a major boost after the election of Richard M. Nixon as president in 1968.
Nixon had campaigned in part on a pledge to channel a major share of federal tax revenues back to the states and localities, to be spent almost entirely at local discretion. General Revenue Sharing had been debated before, but with Nixon’s strong support and that of Vice President, and former Baltimore County Executive, Spiro T. Agnew, the proposal moved ever closed to adoption.
Although its sponsors originally believed the main beneficiaries of GRS would be state governments, with some funds also reaching cities, NACo fought hard to have counties included as recipients of GRS grants. Because of their strong local roots, counties were able to lobby for GRS at the level of individual congressional districts, and slowly a majority evolved for the new measure. When the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972 was passed by Congress, President Nixon hailed it as the beginning of “a new American Revolution.”
It was certainly a major boost for counties, many of which now received significant new funding with which to tackle their ever-growing responsibilities. By mid-1975, revenue sharing funds accounted for about five percent of all revenues counties received from all sources. In some counties, particularly in the south, revenue sharing payments equaled more than half the amount of taxes collected by the county.
By the mid-1980s, however, GRS was threatened with abolition. President Ronald Reagan called for termination of the program at the end of 1986, and Congress was held to specific deficit reductions mandated by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act.
NACo mounted an energetic effort to secure renewal of GRS, similar to its successful lobbying for the program’s renewal in 1976, mobilizing a grass roots effort in which county officials throughout the nation lobbied their representatives and senators to extend the program. These efforts appeared to bear fruit when the House Appropriations Committee included GRS in its omnibus appropriations bill late in 1986. But the House leadership, in a highly unusual move, overruled the committee and removed the GRS extension from the bill without allowing a floor vote.
Though federal revenue sharing passed into history, the concept lived on. During the next decade a growing number of states adopted systems in which they shared state tax revenues with local jurisdictions. The concept of allowing a portion of statewide revenue to be spent by local governments at their own discretion remained strong into the new century.
Special challenges in the west
The west has always attached high importance to vigorous local government. California, after all, was the first state to allow county charters, and Los Angeles County, in 1912, was the first county to adopt one. The initiative, another feature of the progressive era, originated in the west; 12 of the 38 states that allow public referenda, and nine of the 18 that permit recall elections, are in the west.
A political scientist writing in 1913 commented on the “spirit of progress and improvement in matters governmental” that could be observed throughout the west.
Western states and their local governments faced challenges all their own, and the 1970s also saw an innovative effort to address these difficulties. With population spread sparsely over vast areas, towns were scattered and the county was the most prominent form of local government. The great western distances also meant higher costs for roads, power lines, and water, among other public services. Since western residents tended to cluster in urban areas, the west managed to have both below-average population density across its entire area and higher than average urbanization.
Compounding these problems is the huge volume of land that has been removed from local tax rolls over the decades.
Ever since America’s first national park was established at Yellowstone in 1872, large parcels of western land have been regularly set aside for public purposes. Large tracts, also, have been designed as property of Native American nations. So-called “entitlement lands” included holdings of the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Mines and other agencies in addition to parks. All in all, more than 660 million acres of land—one-third of the entire United States—is federally owned.
All of this land has been removed from state and county taxation, with harsh consequences for county governments that are largely dependent on property taxes as a source of revenue.
While federally owned land accounts for one-third of the total area of the nation, its impact is felt disproportionately in the west.
When the states are ranked by percentage of land owned by the federal government, the 13 western states fill all of the top 13 places on the list. Nevada leads the roll with an extraordinary 85.1 percent federally owned land.
Removing this land from local tax rolls, however, did not relieve the local governments of responsibility for providing key services in these areas. Law enforcement was the single largest category of local spending for services performed on entitlement land. Search and rescue services also commanded large shares of local budgets, particularly in national parks and forested areas that have always attracted hikers and others in pursuit of recreational activities. Many localities provided solid waste disposal and other services as well.
The result was a major cost to local government that was not offset by any tax revenue. With their long-ingrained commitment to effective local government, western citizens campaigned energetically for protection from this adverse financial impact. In the mid-1970s, they finally won this relief in the form of Payments in Lieu of Taxes, or PILTs. PILTs were authorized by Congress in 1976 and have been renewed regularly ever since. In some counties, PILTs accounted for more than 80 percent of the entire county budget.
PILT’s impact, moreover, was by no means limited to the west. Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Minnesota and other states all have significant amounts of entitlement lands within their borders. Thus, preserving and expanding the PILT program was a truly national concern for county government.
For many years, though, the annually authorized PILT funding was very modest and did not increase. NACo took the lead in organizing county government officials to campaign for increases in PILT appropriations, and secured the first boost in 1995. Since then, NACo has staged an annual effort to educate lawmakers and remind them of the need for growth in PILTs. An additional $50 million increase was approved in 2001, bringing the authorized spending level to $330 million.
The NACo-led campaign has resulted in more than $100 million being added to the PILT program over the last 10 years.
The turn of another century
As the 1990s drew to an end, county government found itself in a very different situation from what had prevailed at the end of the previous century. It was now a robust and highly flexible level of government, combining local responsiveness with growing sophistication in the provision of complex services.
But it continued to struggle to maintain the right balance among local, state and national authority. The lengthy county campaign against unfunded federal mandates is a prime example. This campaign brought counties together—and especially highly populous urban and suburban counties—to oppose the prospect that the federal government would impose major new requirements on counties without providing funding to enable counties to meet those requirements.
Increasing diversity of population in counties, largely as a result of immigration, also posed a challenge to many counties. This new diversity was appearing in locations across the nation that had lived with fairly stable populations for many years. The need for governmental services and bilingual information placed new and unique demands on many counties.
Another challenge that surfaced in the 90s was that of collecting sales taxes on purchases made on the Internet. With the rapid growth of this medium counties faced a major loss of revenue when purchases heretofore made locally and taxed locally were made via cyberspace. Opponents to this tax state that businesses on the Internet should be supported and that collecting the differing sales tax rates that could be in effect was an undue burden. NACo took a strong role in lobbying for the collection of these taxes and revisited remote sales taxes as a major initiative again in 2003. Working closely with a sample group of states, NACo promoted a pilot group of states that would participate in collecting the taxes for a trial period.
Shifting national political sands also challenged counties. In the 1990s Congress increasingly looked to “block grants” and other generic forms of financial aid to local governments, significant grants of money not accompanied by specific conditions on its spending.
Counties across America have also taken on a much more vigorous role in promoting the economic growth of their communities. Economic development, in fact, has become a key county mission. Counties undertake such efforts as workforce training and expansion of technology infrastructure to make themselves more attractive to high quality businesses looking for new sites. They mount major ongoing initiatives to communicate with these businesses and persuade them to choose county sites for their facilities, and the resulting employment and tax revenues.
For businesses already thriving within county lines, the local economic development authority is often a leader in organizing international trade missions, participation in overseas expositions, and other efforts to reach the ever expanding global markets.
Infrastructure has become a critical element in success, and many counties have assumed a new and powerful role in regulating everything from construction of new high speed data communications to granting of satellite and cable television franchises. Counties have acted broadly and energetically to ensure that their schools, libraries and other public resources are fully served by these new technologies, and that citizens share in the benefits of the Information Age.
As the new millennium opened, it was clear that local government had been cast in a more prominent role than ever before, not only in meeting public needs but in creating opportunity and prosperity for its citizens.
Armed with steadily expanding home rule powers, ever-more-expert leadership and their own long tradition of local accountability, America’s counties were also better prepared than ever to meet the challenge.
The year 2000 brought new challenges to county governments. The economy began to slow down from the boom of the 90s and states began to experience shortfalls in revenues. Shortly thereafter counties began to feel the slowdown with many experiencing shortfalls in their own source revenues and in the revenues normally received from the states. Counties looked to several avenues to balance budgets in response to the shortfalls. Among these were curtailing services, cutting back services, reducing employee benefits, outsourcing and increasing taxes.
At the same time as full blown shortfalls hit their budgets, counties were faced with two new challenges. Correcting the voting problems encountered in the 2000 presidential election and providing homeland security for their county residents. Each of these new issues required massive funding, most of which could not be provided by the counties themselves.
Immediately following the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks, NACo formed a Homeland Security Task Force to work with the federal government to coordinate activities in response to future terrorist threats. As first responders at the attacks, counties showed that their involvement at the national level was crucial to national security.
As the economic slowdown continued many county officials who are savvy in the legislative process began to look again to state and federal governments for assistance and relief. Organizations, such as NACo, that represent county officials began to lobby Congress and the state legislatures across the country in order to encourage and influence legislation that would help counties address the newest challenges. In addition to funding, counties also sought relief from existing and pending legislative requirements and remote sales tax authorization.
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