Counties are Ready for Their Closeup.

• Author: Marlowe, Justin
• Position: IN PRACTICE: PERSPECTIVE

A quarter century ago, Jonathan Walters, a great observer of state and local government, said, "... counties have become the backstop of American government. In fact, a huge amount of responsibility for some of society's toughest, costliest, most thankless jobs has either been handed or simply devolved to county governments, and the results can be overwhelming."

Walters' words are especially salient as we face the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Counties are on the front lines of the pandemic response. They run the epidemiology efforts to track and predict the spread of the virus. They operate public hospitals that serve our neediest. They're rolling out the COVID vaccine in real time. Meanwhile, they just administered the most scrutinized election in a generation, all while tending to public safety, rural roads, vital records, and other essential local services. The backstop of American government is now at the forefront of the American consciousness.

So how will counties leverage this moment in the limelight? Naturally, some have seized on the opportunity to push for more funding. County payrolls generally, and public health in particular, were slashed during and after the Great Recession. According to the National Association of County and City Health Officials, at the start of 2020 the public health workforce was about half of what it was in 2010. Then came COVID. The National Association of County Organizations estimates the pandemic has imposed a $144 billion hit on county budgets, brought on by a combination of lost tax revenues and new pandemic-induced spending. Today more taxpayers than ever are intimately familiar with what their county governments do. That familiarity might translate to much greater willingness to pay.

But that might be the wrong move. Instead of stabilizing revenue streams and securing long-term funding commitments from state legislators--in effect, shoring up the revenue side--counties have a unique opportunity to flip the script. Now is their chance to redefine what they do and how they do it, and then secure the revenues and, more important, the fiscal autonomy to get the job done. Some recent public health initiatives illustrate this point. Most experts agree that our funding model for county-administered public health services suffers from two chronic problems. One is that the funding sources don't keep pace with costs. The property taxes, earmarked local sales taxes, state shared revenues, and federal...