Issue of the Month: Cooperation, Collaboration and Consolidation

The County Commission’s Community Collaboration Work Group recently heard the first part of our consultant’s review of intergovernmental collaboration efforts throughout the country. This first report concentrated on looking at our own county’s past efforts in creating collaborative arrangements, and identified issues facing our county in the future. Based on discussions with local officials and research of media reports, the Upjohn Institute concluded the following:

1. Government units in Kent County have an impressive history of working together in the past. These past successful partnerships will make future collaborative efforts more likely.
2. The type of services that work best for collaborative efforts are those that require large capital investments or are so costly as to inhibit an individual unit from implementing.
3. There are some structural barriers to future collaborations in our county, however, such as differences in service provision standards and costs for different units of local government.
4. There are strong beliefs that certain core services such as fire or police, must be provided locally in order to preserve local government autonomy and accountability.
5. There doesn’t seem to be a unified vision or strategy among Kent County units of government on how to address major challenging issues such as urban sprawl, local government service inefficiencies, and inequities in household income and housing values between the inner ring of cities and townships and villages that affect each government’s finances.

Thus, although this first report concludes that more successful collaborative efforts will be forthcoming, there is a sense that “without a community-wide dialogue to discuss both a regional vision and comprehensive strategy” about some very critical issues affecting the entire region, “the long-term future of the county’s inner cities is uncertain.” The second report examining impact of other area’s governmental consolidation efforts on these issues will be later.