Consolidation, the buzz word circulating in a few regions of North Carolina, is much easier said than done, some city and county officials are finding out.

Although smaller areas, such as Gastonia County and Bessemer City, are grappling with ways to merge their governments, the most notable cities and counties trying to create regional homogenous bureaucracies in North Carolina are New Hanover County-Wilmington in the Southeast and Mecklenburg County-Charlotte in the Piedmont.

In each case, the idea of merging the two entities and sharing costs and mainstreaming community services, programs, and policies has looked good on paper, but has met with less than an enthusiastic response from government officials and the general public.

‘Absolutely no success’

David M. Lawrence, professor of public law and government at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Government and an overall supporter of consolidation, said there has been “absolutely no success in North Carolina” on consolidation. “A lot of people think the merger of city and county makes a lot of sense in the abstract,” he said. “But, it’s extraordinarily difficult to build a coalition to pass it.”

Lawrence said New Hanover County and Wilmington have tried to pass a referendum to consolidate in 1973, 1987, and 1995. Each attempt, however, failed.

This comes as no surprise to Milan J. Dluhy, chairman of the Department of Political Science at UNC-Wilmington. About 80 percent of referendums to consolidate fail nationwide, he said.

“It’s an uphill fight to adopt consolidation,” Dluhy said. “Right now, a double majority vote is required to pass in North Carolina. It’s similar to the double veto in the U.N. Security Council. As long as their political, social, economic interests, and values differ, there will be no positive vote in both the city and county. It needs to be a concurrent majority in both to make it work.”

William J. McCoy, retired director of the Urban Institute at UNC-Charlotte and the leader of a panel working toward regionalization of Mecklenburg County-Charlotte, said many government officials fear consolidation. The officials are afraid of losing power and try to stifle any movement toward merger.

“You always stir up a hornets nest when you start talking about consolidation,” he said. “It hasn’t happened here, and it isn’t about to happen in the short run. It’s a tough deal. It’s a very hard political thing to do, and I don’t see it happening in the future.”

Towns want to keep their identity

One of the biggest issues, he said, is that political leaders in smaller communities within counties think they will lose their identity in a merger. “In the proposals that have floated here the other smaller towns aren’t involved because they don’t want to be,” McCoy said.
“They are afraid of losing their identity, and come hell or high water, they are not going to support (consolidation).”

Another concern of consolidation, he said, is the fear people have of losing their government representation.
A study by the Research Foundation of the National Association of Industrial & Office Properties warned that the potential advantages of merging government “must be weighed against the reduction in citizen access to government and the dilution” of citizen representation that typically accompany mergers of single purpose service providers.

“Reducing the number of governments reduces citizen choices and compromises citizen preferences,” the document said.

Democracy loses, consultant says

A report on the potential benefits and risks associated with merged governments by Wendell Cox, principal of Wendell Cox Consultancy in Belleville, Ill., said consolidated government entities were “anti-democratic.”

In his report, Cox explained why the fears of the public may be warranted. He said smaller governments are more accountable and responsive to their citizens and are more attuned to their communities and neighborhoods.

Conversely, Cox said, larger government bodies face daunting challenges. Not only do they diminish the voice of smaller communities in their jurisdictions, he said, regional governments are less controllable, less successful in delivering quality public services to their residents, and are more susceptible to special- interest groups and interests.

Dluhy said land developers are one such special-interest group in North Carolina that is hoping for government mergers to take place. “Consolidation would help developers out,” he said. “It would streamline land-use regulations and they wouldn’t have to deal with different communities for land use. That’s the name of the game. They wouldn’t have to deal with a bunch of different jurisdictions — only one.”

If developers succeed, they have a better chance of building and lining their pockets with cash, said authors Richard C. Feiock and Jered Carr in an article written on private incentives and public entrepreneurs dealing with the promotion of city-county consolidation.

The authors said consolidation of governments often provides the vehicle to advance an economic development agenda. “Developers may promote centralization of government because they seek the empowered new government to build infrastructure and improve land to benefit the developer,” they said.

There are other downsides to consolidated government. Lawrence said one sticky political issue in North Carolina is that most cities currently have nonpartisan elections, while most counties have partisan elections. He said it would be difficult to arrive at a consensus that would merge both entities into one voting process.

Dluhy said another potential pitfall of consolidation is dilution of the black vote because the majority of blacks live within city limits, where they have concentrated voting power.
Once all the residents in the county are brought together, he said the influence of a cohesive black vote could become obsolete.
“There is a racial undertone to creating a metro, and it is part of the structural consideration,” Dluhy said. “There is a chance there wouldn’t be any blacks on a new metro-commission because the vote would be at-large and there probably wouldn’t be any blacks elected.”

McCoy, Lawrence, and Dluhy agree that consolidation of cities and counties can be positive, but that it doesn’t necessarily mean it will save money. In fact, they said, studies have shown the cost for services in consolidated areas usually increase.

The experts also said the most successful consolidations of governments, such as Jacksonville and Duval County in Florida, have risen from extremely needy areas that once faced widespread political corruption. They said counties in North Carolina don’t face that scenario today.

“The catalyst for consolidation is chaos or corruption,” McCoy said. “There has to be something broke to fix it and [North Carolina] doesn’t have that here. The reasons to consolidate aren’t overwhelming enough to give up inertia to the opposition.”

Welch is a freelance contributor to Carolina Journal.