NACo and counties make strides throughout the ’70s

In 1970, NACo drew its best and brightest ideas through its new Achievement Awards program, which not only allowed the association to recognize innovative programming by county leaders but helped develop a repository of counties’ solutions for problems that many shared. The inaugural cohort included 16 county honorees.

In 2025, NACo awarded more than 1,500 Achievement Awards to almost 200 county members, recognizing 18 best-in-category winners.

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NACo at 90

The hallways of the New Hanover County, N.C. administration building are lined with years’ worth of Achievement Award certificates. If NACo appears in a local newspaper, it’s most likely in commemoration of a county’s recognition, which often includes details of a winning program’s superlative qualities. County News features award-winning programs in every issue.

“I’m proudest of the fact that our county recently received a 2022 National Association of Counties Achievement Award because we’ve put in place some of the best county practices helping veterans in the nation,” Cathrene Nichols said in 2022. Nichols is the regional veterans service center director in Spokane County, Wash.

Almost 50 years after the program began, Leon County, Fla. Commissioner Bryan Desloge made those programs a centerpiece of his NACo presidency.

“One of the primary reasons that organizations like NACo exist is to try and share those best practices. We’re not competing against each other most of the time, so if somebody else has figured out a better way to build a mousetrap, we ought to ‘plagiarize’ it,” he said. “Any time I was criticized for traveling on NACo’s behalf, I would come right back with examples of what I’d learned from other counties that we put to work in Leon County.

“We see a lot of winning programs from large urban counties, but that information can benefit the smaller rural counties that don’t have the same staff capacity,” he said. “It’s a chance to learn from one another.”

The 1970s also saw NACo move into a new office at 1735 New York Ave., NW, along with the purchase of the “Hill House” at 115 C St. SE, which NACo would use for lobbying and entertaining members of Congress.

General revenue sharing

Richard Nixon had campaigned for president partly on a platform of empowering local governments to do more for themselves. A key element in this platform was General Revenue Sharing, a concept that combined the federal government’s prowess in collecting tax revenues with the local discretion in how those funds would be spent. General Revenue Sharing was not new. It had been proposed in Congress in 1958 by Rep. Melvin Laird (R-Wis.). But this time, a motivated administration and an organized collection of county officials made the difference.

General Revenue Sharing meant that the federal government, from its tax revenues, would reallocate a large amount of money to state and local governments in the form of unrestricted grants. The localities could spend this money however they felt proper, in contrast to the long-standing categorical grant programs that restricted spending to specific, approved programs.

Nixon himself mentioned General Revenue Sharing in both 1969 and 1970, but in neither year did the idea leave the congressional starting gate. It had formidable opposition from House leaders such as Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who refused to even hold hearings on revenue sharing.

 “I now propose that we give our states and our cities, our towns and our counties the tools so that they can get on with the job,” Nixon told members of Congress in 1971.

NACo continued to press the idea at any available forum, even when the outcome seemed foreordained. A House Ways and Means Committee hearing in 1970 featured a verbal altercation between Mills and NACo Past President Woodrow Wilson Dumas, mayor-president of East Baton Rouge Parish, La.

“Mr. Chairman,” Dumas said, “we know this game is crooked, but it’s the only game in town!”

Stunned silence reigned in the huge hearing room as Dumas gazed up at the chairman.

“What do you mean?” Mills nearly shouted.

“What I mean,” Dumas replied, “is that your committee has already announced it is opposed to the revenue sharing and that the purpose of this hearing is to kill the idea.”

Mills, one of the Capitol’s most powerful figures, retorted: “And where do you propose to get the money to fund this program?

“Well, Mr. Chairman, I have in my hand a copy of last year’s budget for the House of Representatives,” Dumas replied. “We find places that funds might be better used for aid to hard-pressed local governments. For example, here’s an item for a chauffeur-driven car for the speaker, and then there are the free mailings for congressmen under the franking privilege.”

Dumas’s exchange with Mills was just one episode in a long struggle to build enough grassroots support for General Revenue Sharing to persuade the House of Representatives. Nixon was pressing for several features in General Revenue Sharing that made it less palatable to the House. He wanted, for example, a five-year authorization for the new program, so this politically sensitive issue would not need to be revisited too frequently.

From NACo’s perspective, a key challenge was simply to gain a seat at the negotiating table. The federal sponsors of General Revenue Sharing thought its chief beneficiaries would be state governments, with some funds also being channeled to cities. NACo needed to create a position for counties as a conduit of revenue-sharing money to local communities. Allocation of General Revenue Sharing funds would be based on the percentage of people living in poverty in a given area, the population of the area and the effectiveness of local tax efforts.

As the government unit closest to local communities, counties were ideally positioned to maximize local eligibility for funds. Moreover, county governments could steer a middle course between preponderantly Republican state governors and the mayors of key cities, who tended to be Democrats.

A key ally, and one of the figures most responsible for the eventual success of General Revenue Sharing, was Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Agnew was friendly to NACo and counties because he himself had been Baltimore County, Md.’s executive and later Maryland governor before becoming Nixon’s running mate.

Agnew pressed Nixon to increase the financial commitment he was seeking for General Revenue Sharing, arguing that a modest level of funding individual congressional districts might pass Congress more easily but wouldn’t have enough impact at the local level to demonstrate the effectiveness of the program. The vice president also committed to working closely with NACo leaders to press hard for General Revenue Sharing at every opportunity.

The key to persuading the House was to generate support at the level of individual congressional districts, a task NACo, by structure and membership, could do more effectively than anyone else. Slowly, momentum grew for General Revenue Sharing.

NACo organized one of the proposal’s most successful and visible supporting efforts in mid-1971, when it scheduled a full day of “jet-ins” throughout the country. Each jet-in would gather local officials from a broad area to a meeting facility near a centrally located airport. NACo and administration allies would fly a team of speakers to several of these airports in a single day to brief these officials on the status of General Revenue Sharing and recruit their active support in lobbying their own representatives.

Stops were scheduled in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Kansas City, Cleveland and San Francisco. Agnew himself flew with the NACo team to Atlanta and Kansas City. The rallies were hugely successful in Kansas City. For instance, although only 200 people had registered in advance, more than 1,500 turned out. NACo’s staff had to scramble to set up closed circuit television links to overflow rooms to enable all attendees to hear the vice president.

NACo backed these occasional high-profile events with a steady lobbying campaign period. Slowly, the opposition was persuaded until both houses passed the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972 in the summer of that year. Harmonizing the different versions of the legislation and conference committee proceeded into the fall. Finally, Nixon scheduled a ceremony at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to sign into law the bill he called “the new American Revolution.”

In 1972, Hillenbrand had assigned Larry Naake, then 30, to represent NACo in lobbying Congress and the Nixon administration on General Revenue Sharing.

“It was an amazing experience for a young kid new to the Washington political scene,” Naake said more than 50 years later. “It was, at least up to that point in NACo’s lifetime, along with that of state and other local government organizations, our most important legislative success.”

NACo also saw its ability to do government advocacy work fortified in 1974. Attorney General William B. Saxbe decided that the organizations of the county, city and state officials were not covered by the 1946 Regulation of Lobby Act, which specifically exempted public officials from the regulation. He sent a flood of agents into the offices of the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) and threatened the staff with prosecution for violating the act.

Saxbe argued that while city, county and state officials were exempt from the lobby law, their associations were not – a key pillar of today’s intergovernmental framework. NACo, the National League of Cities and USCM went to court. On Dec. 17, 1974, U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell issued his declarative judgement in their favor:

“Involvement of cities, counties and municipalities into the day-to-day work of the Congress is of an increasing and continuing importance. The court must recognize that the voice of cities, counties and municipalities in federal legislation will not be adequately heard unless through cooperative mechanisms such as the plaintiff organizations. They pool their limited finances for the purpose of bringing to the attention of Congress their proper official concerns on matters of public policy.”

“There can be no doubt that all officers and employees of the plaintiff organizations are engaged in lobbying solely for what may purposely be stated to be the ‘public will’ as conceived by those in government they represent, who are themselves officials solely responsible to the public and acting in their official capacities.”