Area-wide Service Delivery in Georgia
| Jurisdiction | Georgia,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 27 No. 1 Pg. 0016 |
| Pages | 0016 |
| Publication year | 2021 |
The Legal
The concept of the delivery of local government services on a regional or area-wide basis in Georgia may warrant consideration as an alternative for improving local government service delivery, particularly in some of the declining rural areas of Georgia.
BY JAMES V. BURGESS JR.
There have been a number of initiatives to eliminate fragmentation in urban service delivery by counties and municipalities in Georgia since the 1950s. In 1951, an attempt was made to sort out urban services and functions to eliminate functional duplication in service delivery between Atlanta and Fulton County.[1] This was followed by voter approval of a constitutional amendment in 1972, authorizing both counties and cities to provide the same type of urban services.[2] In 1991, Gov. Zell Miller's Local Government Commission on solving service delivery problems found extensive jurisdictional fragmentation among Georgia's local governments.[3] In 1995, the Georgia Future Communities Commission proposed legislation for service delivery reform. Its recommendations resulted in passage of the Service Delivery Act (HB 489) that required cities u and counties to minimize duplication and overlap in service delivery and conflicts in land use plans.[4]
A concept for improving urban service delivery on a regional basis that received limited attention in these earlier reform e efforts is the delivery of urban services on an area-wide basis. Under this concept, Georgia's 159 counties would be grouped together regionally to provide delivery of urban services. The current 12 regional commissions would serve as a model for implementation of this concept, and, by expanding their direct service delivery, could achieve economies of scale that would result in cost savings to local governments throughout Georgia, and particularly in rural areas.
Local vs. Area-Wide
While there is little published research in Georgia about the delivery of local government services on a regional or areawide basis, the concept was examined extensively in a report by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) in 1963.[5] The ACIR report analyzes urban functions and presents conclusions about whether they should be performed on a local, area-wide or intermediate basis. The report examines 15 major urban functions and enumerates economic and political criteria for evaluating these functions from the standpoint of an appropriate area of jurisdictional performance. It presents three groupings of urban functions in terms of whether the service is confined or broadly diffused throughout the region. The three groupings of services are distinguished on the following basis:
1) Services whose benefits are least susceptible to appropriation by any one individual and most likely enjoyed on a community-wide basis. These services include:
● Parks and conservation.
● Sanitary and health inspection services.
● Highways and streets.
● Planning and zoning.
● Building and housing inspection.
● Judicial functions.
● Civil defense.
● Nuisance control.
● Welfare.
2) Services whose benefits are enjoyed almost exclusively by the individual consumer. These services include:
● Refuse collection and disposal.
● Gas and electricity.
● Golf courses.
● Curb, gutter and sidewalk improvement and maintenance.
● Transportation terminals, airports.
● Legal services.
3) Services that fall between the above groupings in that their benefits are enjoyed primarily by individual consumers. These services include:
● Water supply.
● Sewage disposal.
● Public health services.
● Hospital and medical facilities.
● Transportation.
● Recreation programs.
● Education.
● Libraries.
These services are analyzed in terms of whether the cost and spill over benefits of the service is susceptible to areawide performance and ranked on a scale of "most local" through "most area-wide" as follows:
● Fire protection.
● Public education.
● Refuse collection and disposal.
● Libraries.
● Police.
● Health.
● Urban renewal.
● Housing.
● Parks and recreation.
● Welfare.
● Hospital and medical care.
● Transportation.
● Planning.
● Water supply and sewage disposal.
● Air pollution control.
These 15 functions and services account for approximately 85% of local government expenditures.[6] Examples of criteria used in evaluating the optimum performance of these 15 urban services include:
● The governmental jurisdiction responsible for the service should be large enough to allow benefits of the service to be enjoyed primarily within the jurisdiction.
● The unit of government should be large enough to realize benefits of economies of scale.
● The unit of government should have sufficient administrative and legal authority to perform the service.
● The unit of government should be controllable and accessible to its residents and allow opportunities for citizen participation.
Area-Wide Service Delivery in Georgia
ACIR's demonstration of an approach for area-wide delivery of urban services may not be fully applicable or even feasible as a model for implementation in most Georgia communities. However, this concept for area-wide service delivery may warrant consideration as an alternative for improving local government service delivery, particularly in some of the declining rural areas of Georgia.
Georgia's Regional Commissions (see page 19) may offer possible geographic jurisdictions for area-wide service delivery. Georgia was one of the first states in the country that allowed local government to voluntary form regional groupings of counties, initially known as Area Planning and Development Commissions (APDCs). These APDCs were later reconstituted as Regional Development Centers (RDCs) by the Georgia Planning Act of 1989, and given responsibility for the establishment of coordinated and comprehensive planning for the state and for assisting local governments with the preparation of such plans.[7]
Regional cooperation and coordination in service delivery was one of the key issues considered by The Commission for a New Georgia (CNG) established during Gov. Sonny Perdue's administration.[8] As an innovative public-private partnership, the CNG's goal was to provide an opportunity for leaders from both sectors to lend expertise in the areas of policy development and governmental operations. It was comprised of small, highly focused working groups created around a dozen or so themes and chaired by prominent business leaders. Each task force was charged with reviewing and analyzing various aspects of state government, learning as much as possible about the issues, sharing best practices and providing ideas for improvement. Creative suggestions generated by the task forces were forwarded to the governor and senior staff for review, and transferred to the appropriate governmental agency or department for potential implementation.
The Service Delivery Task Force, as its name implies, reviewed matters related to the delivery of services and their coordination by state agencies, local governments and regional entities. This particular task force was active from 2007-09 and chaired by...
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