Sym*bi*o*sis. Sym*me*try. Syn*er*gy: the case for interlocal cooperation.

• Author: Holdsworth, William Arthur

To understand why interlocal cooperation among governments has so much potential, one needs to take stock of the trends affecting local governments today:

* Federal and state budget challenges continue, reducing revenue sharing and grant opportunities

* Local governments are struggling with serious budget issues

* A significant percentage of public sector employees are approaching retirement

* Local governments and their economies are highly interdependent

* The redundancy of resources and services across local governments is pronounced

This is a disturbing series of trends. Local governments everywhere must protect and serve their communities in ever more efficient and effective ways. To this end, the Michigan Government Finance Officers Association (MGFOA) developed a white paper on intergovernmental shared services, entitled "The Business Case for Interlocal Cooperation." (1)

Traditionally, when communities had to operate more or less independently due to geographic and technological isolation, direct and sole service provision was expected. Nationally, nearly 90,000 local units of government operate largely independently from one another (see Exhibit 1). All provide indirect services (e.g., payroll, accounting, purchasing, information technology, etc.) while the core services provided are essentially the same across communities. Many of these are capital-intensive and consume large proportions of the fiscal budget (e.g., public safes courts, public works, etc.). Residents and businesses are less concerned about where their services come from than they are about quality and cost-effectiveness of the services themselves. Residents often live in one community yet work in another, and businesses service a much broader area than a single community. Arguably, then, the holistic provision of services regionally should be the focus of local governments. In many cases, cities, villages, and townships (CVTs) and counties may do well to view:

* Themselves as a team of service providers contracted by a common set of regional customers

* Inter-community competition as counterproductive

* Regional cooperation and re-engineering of service delivery models at the inter-community level as potentially cost-effective and of greater benefit to constituents

Many CVTs and counties are pursuing interlocal (intergovernmental) cooperation (ILC) and joint public services (JPS) initiatives. These initiatives can range from the simple to the complex (as illustrated in Exhibit 2) and can occur at four interlacing levels:

* County to county

* County to CVT

* CVT to CVT

* Public-private partnerships, e.g., county/CVT to private entity(ies)

BENEFITS OF INTERJURISDICTIONAL COOPERATION

Regional collaboration is really nothing new and many communities have extensive collaborative arrangements in place already. Thus, exploring additional opportunities should not be perceived as something unorthodox or threatening. Perhaps what is new is the willingness of today's CVTs and counties to explore new and creative ways of addressing their financial challenges by constructing a more efficient service delivery structure and better serving citizens at the same time. If one were to delineate the results of collaboration between communities, the list would undoubtedly include the following:

* Typical of jurisdictions covering broad geographic areas, the provision of service--either in terms of quantity or quality--may not be uniform, e.g., timeliness of delivery or access to the service may be impacted by distance from the source. Often this is due to the inability of the jurisdiction to afford more optimal coverage, technically more sophisticated equipment, or more extensively trained personnel. Interlocal cooperation is particularly well-suited for optimizing what would otherwise be underutilized resources. Thus, the increased cost of additional and/or state-of-the-art equipment and higher-paid staff can be economically justified if the services are provided to, and shared over, a larger area. This can lead to more uniform service delivery and quality.

* In tandem with uniformity of service delivery and enhancement of asset utilization, ILC/JPS initiatives can reduce redundancy of operations and equate to both intangible (quality) and tangible (cost) improvements across participating communities.

* The intangible benefits of interlocal cooperation include:

* Expanding the sense of community

* Providing, in some cases, a service that would not otherwise be...