montague brown <
brnmont@AZSTARNET.COM>
wrote:
>
>Out here in the lovely Tanque Verde Valley we are having a discussion about
>incorporating our neighborhood, sandwiched between Tucson and a national
park.
>
>It seems to me that the proliferation of governments adds to cost;
>ultimately requires each area to seek development in order to gain revenue
>to build services...which are often too small to be efficient.
>
>So, one alternate direction is to move towards a Metropolitan or Regional
>Government. I think Dade County has such a government, Minneapolis and
>some other regions of the country.
Monty:
We have an ongoing process of regionalization superceding local municipal
administrations in Ontario, Canada. It has been going on for nearly 20
years, and does not seem over yet. Today is Election Day in Ontario, and
three more mega-governments are being formed from today's elections,
included a new Toronto (made up of five previous cities or boroughs, one of
which was the old City of Toronto...).
The process has been resisted fiercely all the way, and that resistance
continues. While I suspect there may be better fora for this discussion
than MG-ED, I'll throw in my 2 cents worth here. IMHO it seems that the
inexorable process has been driven by economic scale efficiencies that,
while real, run contrary to many people's sense of what the lowest and
closest level of government should be about. Here in Niagara, people hang
on tenaciously to neighbourhood names that were once thriving
municipalities, but are now governmental fictions. Those neighbourhoods
mean something, even if sewer administration should be handled at the
regional level.
We need a level of leadership, civic administration, and neighbourhood
management that is human scale, that relates well to the inhabitants' sense
of empowerment. And we want the economic efficiencies of regional
operations. Whatever you do, try for both.
I don't see the incompatibility of that combination, but I do see the
incompatibility of a sense of neighbourhood communities with the alienated,
impersonal efficiency of regional government. We can't have much sense of
community if we don't know our candidates for government because that
government is too big.
Other MG-ED listeners: Do we have any comparable models that work? Of
broad, economic, efficient delivery, combined with localized control and
participation? How do we balance the economic virtues of large scale with
the opposite virtues of local empowerment?
Best regards,
Tom Bryant.
+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+
Prof. Thomas A. Bryant, Ph.D.
1997-98 Chair, Entrepreneurship Division, Admin. Sciences Assn of Canada
(ASAC)
Entrepreneurship Program, Faculty of Business, Brock University
St. Catharines, ON, L2S 3A1, CANADA
tbryant@peregrine.bus.brocku.ca
(905) 688-5550, ext. 4372 voice
(905) 984-4188 fax.
e-mail:
tbryant@peregrine.bus.BrockU.ca