National Experts Back Spokane’s Proposed Charter Four Say Consolidation Worth Supporting Despite Plan’s Flaws

People who study government for a living say they would vote for city-county consolidation if they lived in Spokane.

“It’s a more logical way of addressing area-wide problems,” said John Shannon, a consultant with the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. “I came away with the impression that the good government folks have a fairly good case.”

Shannon was one of four national experts who critiqued the proposed unified charter at the request of The Spokesman-Review. Voters will consider the charter on Nov. 7. Each of them saw flaws in the document, but each said it’s worthy of support.

The experts said they doubt claims that unification would save money, but think it would make Spokane better in a number of other ways.

It may be a moot issue, since they doubt voters will accept the proposal. Consolidation normally doesn’t pass unless a community is rocked by scandal or crisis, they noted.

“It’s amazing that you got it this far,” said Jeff Stonecash, a professor of state and local politics at Syracuse University in New York.

Here’s what the experts said:

Stonecash estimates he’s reviewed some 50 merger proposals over the past 20 years. Spokane’s is fairly standard, he said.

He likes the idea of electing an executive but doubts it will be universally accepted.

“As a good liberal, I like consolidated governments because they tend to increase accountability,” Stonecash said. “But a good conservative might be nervous about the concentration of power.”

The new government would require voters to pay closer attention to their candidates, he said. With non-partisan positions, “you can end up with elections where voters are grasping for information on their candidates.”

Spokane city elections already are non-partisan. County elections pit Republicans versus Democrats.

Politicians will work harder, too, especially during the transition from two governments to one. They’d spend endless hours explaining changes to the public, Stonecash said.

Although he thinks the merger would cost more in the short term, Stonecash said citizens could see some tax savings in the long run. That could happen if the new government has an expanded tax base and can spread the operating cost of its services over more customers, he said.

Shannon, the former director of the U.S. Advisory Council on Inter-Government Relations, said he’s not surprised the charter suggests non-partisan elections. People in the Northwest have always been leery of machine politics, he said.

But the charter breaks another Northwest tradition by giving the executive broad powers now spread among several elected officials. That’s the trend among government reformers, Shannon said.

“You’ve got to have somebody strong running a bigger city,” he said. “You have to be able to hold somebody responsible for what happens.”

The charter provision that forbids layoffs of current city and county workers for two years works against any short-term savings, he said.

“You may get better government, but it may not result in a drop in the tax level,” said Shannon, who previously taught political science and public financing at George Washington and Creighton universities.

David Rusk, author of “Cities Without Suburbs,” fires up his computer when asked about consolidation. The former mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., keeps a database of economic and social statistics about every city in the nation.

From 1950 until 1990, Spokane was below the national and regional averages for growth in family income, said Rusk. Using the same standard, cities that consolidated during those years “have all been among the top performers,” he said.

“You had major corporations that were planning to leave Nashville that decided to stay as a result of consolidation … You had Indianapolis completely redo its downtown as a result of ‘unigov,”’ as Hoosiers call the government they created in 1969.

“They (Indianapolis) really achieved big league status in a hurry.”

A political science professor at Washington State University, David Nice, was more familiar with Spokane than the rest of the experts who reviewed the charter.

An elected executive and council districts would serve Spokane well, he said.

“There isn’t a magical number” of council members, Nice said. “If you make it smaller, you’ve got simpler decision-making, although … if you have a real small council, like three or five (members), the really urban areas are going to end up dominating the whole thing.”

Nice said the community would be better off if consolidation were more comprehensive. But a proposal that would dissolve the small towns wouldn’t stand a chance of passing, he said.

A bigger problem, Nice said, are all the water districts, sewer districts, cemetery districts and fire districts that will remain intact if the charter passes. It’s a problem everywhere.

“You may be affected by the actions of any number of local governments, some of which you may not even know exist, let alone who’s running them,” he said.

Nice said that if he had written the charter, he wouldn’t have locked the government into spending 8 percent of its budget on parks, as is required in the city. Rusk said the requirement could cause cutbacks in other departments if the government starts running low on money.

He would have written stronger prohibitions against council members participating in decisions that could benefit them financially.

And he would not have required politicians to ask voters before imposing new taxes.

“In the current political climate (such requirements) are popular to have,” he said. “In the long term, it can cause problems.”

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ABOUT THE CHARTER If voters approve the charter they are choosing a new form of government to replace Spokane’s City Council and County Commission. All city and county departments would merge. The government would have 13 council members elected to represent districts of about 30,000 people. Voters countywide would elect an executive with authority similar to a state governor or strong mayor. The 10 small towns would remain independent. The charter does not set the government’s budget or its employee roster. Those and other policy issues can only be addressed by the officials voters would elect to run the government.