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Our view: Others show region how to save money
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Here's what sensible people do when the economy turns south. They clutter a kitchen table with a calculator, a stack of bills and a pencil and ask themselves tough questions, like "How can I cut my expenses?" and "What can I live without?"
That's what good governments should do, too.
For regular folks, if they could make a big dent in their spending just by restructuring the way they run their households, they'd have no choice but to do just that.
It's time for local governments in the Dayton region to follow the same logic. An opportunity is there, as a new study from the other end of the state has again demonstrated.
A group of major players in northeast Ohio, including two big foundations and a couple of chambers of commerce, are pushing that region to get serious about consolidating government services in the name of saving money. They hired an independent group called the Center for Governmental Research in Rochester, N.Y., to gather a pile of data to compare northeast Ohio with five similar regions. Within Ohio, they compared themselves against the Columbus and Dayton regions. Beyond the state line, the study compared those areas against the regions surrounding Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Raleigh, N.C.
Researchers drew no conclusions, but the data generally supported the argument for consolidation. In North Carolina, where local government and schools are run through a large county structure with fewer small governmental entities, per-capita spending for government services tended to be lower and growing at a slower rate than the others.
The comparisons with the Dayton region were a bit uneven. For the study, researchers considered the Dayton region to be these seven counties — Montgomery, Miami, Clark, Champaign, Greene, Preble and Darke. That's probably not how most of us would draw the lines, and that grouping also made the Dayton region considerably smaller than the other comparison cities. With a population of 1,097,330, the Dayton region as defined in this research is half the size of Columbus and nearly four times smaller than Cleveland-Akron-Youngstown.
Still, the data is useful to the area, and the central argument it supports — that consolidation of some services could save money — applies here, too.
Consider just the sheer number of governmental entities in the seven-county Dayton region. The study lists 300, including counties, municipalities, townships, school districts and special districts like county educational service centers, transit authorities and sewer districts.
There were so many that researchers said they were not certain they had even counted all of them. The study says there are about 3,658 persons per entity in our region, one of the highest rates in the study. By comparison, Raleigh, with more than twice the population, has only 188 local government entities, or 12,295 persons per entity.
The good news is our local governments are comparatively frugal. Using Census data, the study found Dayton had the lowest spending per capita, and the growth in government spending here was lower over a 10-year period ending in 2002 than the two Ohio regions.
Even so, Raleigh's spending growth is half that of Dayton and tracks almost perfectly to inflationary growth, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. All the other regions in the study were spending at a rate that far outpaced inflation.
Raleigh has unique advantages. North Carolina, by law, anoints counties as the primary governmental entity. As a result, most services, even school districts, are countywide. Ohio isn't going to go in that direction anytime soon.
But Charles Zettek, one of the study's authors, said changing the law is not the only way to go. Most of the potential savings you see in Raleigh's data could be achieved in other cities through simple cooperation among governments.
Our region has had a tough go of that so far. Too many local governments have refused, for example, to go along with a sensible effort to consolidate all of Montgomery County's 911 services under one umbrella. But if that experience made people gun shy, they have to get over it.
Regional cooperation is a must for the Dayton area. The northeast Ohio study again shows there is money to be saved. That's not to be ignored in a time when the community is struggling economically and tax receipts are dropping.
In the process of saving a few bucks, more cooperative efforts among local governments have the added benefit of getting leaders on the same page when it comes to selling and marketing the area.
Simple cooperation could become a competitive advantage for the Ohio region that embraces it most quickly and most effectively. Done right, a unified Dayton region could be leaner, more efficient and more competitive. That's what taxpayers need in this economy.
