A metro merger wave: could it be?

• Author: Peirce, Neal
• Position: Commentary - City-county consolidations - Column

Could America be ready for a wave of city-county consolidations?

Until this year, it would have seemed madness to suggest so. From the 1960s, when Nashville, Jacksonville, and Indianapolis put together mergers, no major city merged until Louisville and surrounding Jefferson County voted to join in a dramatic 2000 referendum.

Even then, I treated Louisville as an odd region out-a place where an array of city and county services, economic development efforts, even a wage tax base, had been shared for years.

But rub your eyes and catch what's occurring at this very moment:

In Buffalo, Erie County Executive Joel Giambra is calling for a "New Greater Buffalo," a totally new government to replace the traditional city and county' structures that he and Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello agree are no longer viable.

Masiello argues: "Let's be bold and get away from nit-picking over who absorbs whom and creating a rehash of two older governments."

The bottom line, Giambra and Masiello insist, is that the Buffalo/Upstate New York economy is unraveling and that dramatic action is imperative to save scarce public funds and promote the region as a unified, can-do place.

Just as dramatic, Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy and Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato have shocked the Pennsylvania political world by suggesting the time has come for their two governments to study outright merger.

For the Pittsburgh area, whose 418 cities, boroughs, and townships (130 in Allegheny County alone) make it the fragmentation capital of America, true success at putting rivalry and competition to the side would be a kind of early 21st century miracle.

But like Buffalo, Pittsburgh faces dire operating deficits brought on t)y decades of industrial flight, sagging land values. dwindling population, and lack of the major immigrant influx that has enlivened many cities' economies.

Both cities are now under state fiscal control boards--even as suburbanites, in the words of Bill Toland in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, are "forced to watch as ... (the) hub city suffers, mulling the prospect that a withering core will eventually drag its suburbs, and the region, down with it."

Yet fresh talk of merger isn't even limited to worst-suffering Buffalo and Pittsburgh. It's reported, in one form or another, in Cleveland, in Rochester, Syracuse, and Binghamton in New York, and in Erie and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania.

Bad times are the mother of necessity, driving Frostbelt...