Contract cities in California.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Soundbite - Interview

Southern California writer D.J. Waldie is best known for his remarkable, genre-creating Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (Norton), a poetic, fragmentary history of his native suburban grid town of Lakewood, California. Less well known is that Waldie's day job most of his adult life has been working for the municipality of Lakewood, which has claims on being America's first contract city--a city in which most of the services are purchased from private companies or other governments. In December, Editor in Chief Matt Welch (who worked briefly for the city of Lakewood as a teenager) sat down with Waldie to discuss how Lakewood's approach to small government has helped it weather California's struggling economy and fiscal troubles. Watch the full interview at reason.tv.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the history of the contract city concept, how it has applied to the development of Lakewood, and how Lakewood is different from cities around it?

A: Lakewood was the very first city in the nation to contract for most of its municipal services from other sources. Initially that other source was the County of Los Angeles, but in the decades following 1954 when Lakewood incorporated, we've branched out to provide services under contract with the county (like our sheriff's department) services with private industry (like trash collection and street sweeping), services with other public entities, other consortia. For example, our animal control service is done by a consortium of cities that banded together to provide animal control services. And some services are conducted in-house, like our park department, which originally was a standalone special district but in 1957 was folded into the city of Lakewood as our recreation department. Now, in '54, this was a radically different idea. No city in America had incorporated on that basis. So there are about 40 cities in L.A. county that are contract...