Marc Funkhouser ~
Thank you friends for having me.
The question - should there be a consolidation, yes or no - is actually a very tough political question. And I’m going to start by reading you a poem from Sir Walter Scott, which he published in 1805. It’s called “The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI,” and I remembered the opening lines of this poem since I first read it when I was in my twenties, and in my view it speaks right to this question. And when I began to think about what my opening remarks might be here after Fred talked to us on the phone, this is the first thing that came to my mind.
“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.”
“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, this is my own, and my native land,” where he or she just happened to be born? I happened to be born in Appalachia. And unlike most young white men who grew up in Appalachia, I went on, traveled all over the world, and obtained a PhD, but those roots from Appalachia colored the way that I see the world. What we’re talking about here is an ancient human urge, and it needs to be nurtured and respected. Not just my nation, but my hometown, my culture, my tribe - that is ancient human stuff, and it matters enormously.
And that brings me to what I think is the central issue here - what I call the paradox of place. Ours, today, is an age of splintering and fracturing. Things seem to be coming apart. We have the United Kingdom, then we have Northern Ireland, we have Scotland, we have Wales, we have Czechoslovakia which became the Czech Republic, and we have the Slovak Republic. We have various attempts now that encourage the State of California to succeed. Please don’t. But that splintering and fracturing, why is that happening? It’s because people are longing for a sense of rootedness, of home, of community, and control. And the world is demanding efficiency, effectiveness, and economies of scale. There are logical, rational reasons why Orange County should be one political entity governed by one political body. And that will maybe, probably happen because the world demands it. But it isn’t easy because that’s not what we like and what we want. So there’s the collision - the paradox of place. We want our own little place of the world where we grew up, where we know folks, where they think the way we do, and so on and so forth. But to make that place work, it has to be efficient and it has to be effective. As Kirk said, his measure of effectiveness was population growth, and that is right. Places that are dying lose population, and places that are thriving gain population. People do vote with their feet.
So, the pressure is very much there for consolidating. Look at the corporate world - they merge, they grow, they pull people in, and they get bigger because that’s the way to survive in the pressures of today’s world. Can jurisdictional boundaries that were drawn decades or even centuries ago survive the economic pressures of today? That’s a really tough challenge, and I doubt it, so to speak, that they can. I don’t claim to know, but that is the challenge. Consolidation is very difficult to pull off. Kirk said that 80% of the counties fail. But, when it happens, it is valued. Ask the people of National Dates and Counting whether or not it’s thriving - yes it is. Kansas City, Kansas merged with Wyandotte County, and we already touched on that case. It was spiraling down, but it is not spiraling down now and it is beginning to recover. When you ask folks if they want to consolidate, they say no. Then when you get it done they say, “Damn, that’s great!” But it’s all about figuring out how to do that.
Are shared services, which Kirk mentioned, a proxy, so to speak, for consolidation? Well it’s interesting. In the current issue of our magazine, Justin Marlow, who used to be at the University of Kansas I think when you were there Kirk, has an economic column and he says that there has been an explosion of shared services agreements since the Great Recession. They are way up, and they were driven by that financial exigency. But they have, as Kirk just said, limited financial impact. And that’s because - this is stepping away now from Justin’s work and making my own sort of conclusion - when you have achieved the economies of scale by merging your emergency services departments, merging your public work departments, and so forth and so on, you don’t actually save any money because of the elasticity of demand. The demand for services generally far exceeds our capacity to deliver them. So if we could deliver more services for the same money, we would. If we could respond to calls for service the same ways that we did before but with less money, we’d choose to do the service rather than bank the money. So no, I don’t think that they’re necessarily a proxy. I think they are sort of halfway, but they’re happening a lot more. When I “consult” with local governments, I advocate shared services agreements all of the time, and there are certain state governments - and Justin lays this out in his article - that are encouraging, mandating, or pushing for them. You get more state aid in Michigan, for example, if you enter into a shared services agreement. In Oakland County, Michigan, for instance, which is a very wealthy county just outside of Detroit, they actually provide shared services agreements to most areas now. So every little bird gets to keep its own police department, but it does not have to have the whole dispatch thing and all of the computerized dispatching. Instead, Oakland County supplies that for them.
David Brooks from the New York Times, in a column yesterday which was headlined, “This Century is Broken,” describes a nation that is hunkering down and that is less mobile, less innovative, less entrepreneurial, and that has declined in work force participation, especially for white men. He writes that 57% of white males who have dropped out get by on some form of government disability check, and about half the men who have dropped out take pain medication on a daily basis. A survey in Ohio found that over one three month period, 11% of all Ohioans were prescribed opiates. One in eight American men now has a felony conviction on his record. The challenge, he says, is this: the “hard part” is that America has to become more dynamic and more protective both at the same time. That’s that conundrum. Those men that he described that are on pain medication and so forth and so on need a sense of place, of worth, of self, and tribe, and that hasn’t happened. They need a sense of control, and they feel that hasn’t happened, and they’re losing that economic race that I talked about.
So here’s my conclusion. Our challenge in Orange County and in cities and counties across America is to solve the paradox of place. We have to find a way to achieve the economies of scale that we need for economic growth and viability, while at the same time preserving and strengthening communities of individuals bound by attachment to a particular place, to a common culture, and to each other. That’s how you’re going to deal with this question. You find a way to finesse it so that you can get the economies of scale, but you keep people feeling like their home and their neighborhood is the same as it was. Thank you.