Forms of Local Government: A Handbook on City, County and Regional Options.

• Author: Michel, R. Gregory
• Position: Review

Kemp, Roger L., editor

Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1999. (388 pp)

America contains a plethora of different city, county, and regional governments. Far from being uniform, American local governments differ greatly in the structure of their governance. The purpose of this handbook is to "make sense out of the complex assortment of local government forms."

This book is a compilation of 45 articles and reports from 21 separate journals and publications. Each article or report is a separate chapter. The book's 45 chapters are divided into eight sections. The first section provides an introduction to local governments. Sections two, three, and four each focus on city, county, and regional governments, respectively. Sections five, six, and seven study the success of particular government structures and future trends in city, county, and regional governments. The last section looks at the future of local government in American cities, counties, and regions.

Part I includes an overview of five types of local governments: counties, cities, towns and townships, school districts, and special districts. The author describes the typical services provided by each type of government, their primary sources of revenue, and their governance structure. It tells the history of local government reform over the past one hundred years, and introduces the National Civic League and its model charters.

Part II begins with a history of American local government. The author presents an unbiased comparison of the five primary forms of local governance: weak mayor, strong mayor, council-manager, commission, and town meeting. It summarizes existing research on two important aspects of the council-manager form of government: the separation between policy and administration, and the capability of this form of governance to increase economy and efficiency in government.

Similar to previous sections, Part III begins with an overview of county governments, which includes a brief history of county government and an explanation of the basic forms of county government.

Part IV focuses on regional government. The first chapter in this section discusses trends in the post-industrial economy and their implications for regional governance. The following chapter argues that cities and their surrounding suburbs "must embrace strategies of regional cooperation" in order to compete in the global economy. Seventeen approaches to regional cooperation which vary from informal...