Should Fairlawn, Bath and Copley Merge?

This past week, Ohio Treasurer David Yost began advocating for laws that would allow more mergers of local government units.  And a well-known blogger asked why people own their own lawnmowers as opposed to entering cooperative arrangements with their neighbors.  The questions, what it will take to see more governmental merger and why everyone has his own lawnmower, have common answers.

It is true that in theory consolidating smaller villages and townships into larger ones would in theory save money.  Merging allows governments to build what economists call economies of scale.  Often a larger organization can do everything a number of smaller organizations do with fewer people and therefore less money.  Imagine two adjoining townships – call them Adams Township and Baker Township – with similar populations, geography and demographics decide to merge.

First off, the new Adams-Baker Township may find that some administrative tasks take the same amount of time and effort for the merged township as for either of the individual townships. It may be, for example, that running a computer program to print out a thousand payroll checks, bundling them and forwarding them to their respective departments doesn't take appreciably more time than running the same program for five hundred employees. So Adams-Baker needs only one payroll clerk, where the two individual townships needed two.

Economies of scale also enable a government to use the full capacity of resources.  Perhaps the road departments of Adams and Baker Townships each needed one-and-a-half dump trucks.  Since they couldn't buy half a dump truck, they each bought two.  Adams-Baker can get by with only three instead of four. 

Of course there are limits to gaining efficiency by merging.  First off, merger doesn't automatically mean you can fire half the employees and get rid of half the infrastructure.  If local governments merge to the point that we have 20 percent fewer, it doesn't follow that we save 20 percent of the cost of local government.  Also at some point an organization gets too big.  Think of inefficiency, corruption or dysfunction in any large city to see that at work.

But that's not the major problem.  The major problem is that consolidation won't happen when people don't want it to.  Which is where the lawnmower comes it.

The blogger Atrios noted that, given the limited time we actually use our lawnmowers, it would make economic sense for people to share a lawnmower among two or more households.  Bloggers responded by pointing out many challenges to such an arrangement – challenges that also bedevil attempts to convince communities to merge.

The first is that neither lawnmowers nor communities are all alike.  People have different tastes in each, and will buy – either a lawnmower or a house in a certain community – based on those tastes.

For example, Bath and Copley both are wealthy suburban townships, but their cultures differ significantly.  Many residents presumably have chosen to live in Copley Township because they want to live in a place that looks a lot like Copley Township and not Bath Township, and vice-versa.  Merging won't just change the balance sheet, it will necessarily change the places that merge.

To start a lawnmower co-op, a person would have to find neighbors who want essentially the same lawnmower – and even then compromises are inevitable.  For people to want to merge with the next town over, they would have to believe that town is sufficiently similar to them that the compromises involved in the merger would not be excessive.

The second common problem is trust.  Participants in a lawnmower co-op have to trust the other members that they would buy roughly the same amount of gas, pay for unexpected repairs and generally equally participate in the costs of owning a mower. 

The problems of trust arising from governmental mergers are the same, only multiplied by the number of residents. A smaller community will feel it is being taken over by a bigger one.  A richer community will chafe at paying more of its share of the budget.

By accident of history Ohio has more governmental units in relation to our population than other states.  Merger sounds like a great way to reduce the cost of government statewide. As long as it involves someone else's community.