A Citistates Study/Action Search Project
The United States has plunged into a season of traumatic change — likely to last a decade or more. Serious recession, growing energy supply dilemmas and the deep challenge of global climate change are typical of new shared responsibilities that our federal system of government — after 30 years of devolution and inattention to respective responsibilities — must learn to address far more effectively.
While the nation’s attention is riveted on a health care and other federal-level issues, the nation’s states and localities too find themselves struggling — not just for fiscal breath, but for a sense of how they reorganize for extraordinarily challenging times.
In a welcome development, the Obama administration has sought to reach out, not just to governors but to local officials looking for ways to weather the economic downturn and position themselves for future growth.
For the first time since the 1970s, an explicit federal urban policy is being attempted. The Departments of Transportation, Energy and Housing and Urban Development, together with the Environmental Protection Agency, are attempting field collaboration to bring their activities into “sync” for more sustainable local communities. Federal Cabinet officials are engaged in listening tours to various city regions. There’s a new White House Office of Urban Affairs. And the Office of Management and Budget is undertaking a sweeping review of federal programs impacting cities — the first of its kind since the 1970s. There’s even promise that the new administration will focus attention on the strengthening of entire metropolitan regions — an approach President Obama promised while campaigning in 2008, and has recently reiterated.
A focus on entire regions — the “real cities” of our times — could not be more timely.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors found that in 2007 the nation’s 10 largest regions had a collective “gross metro product” of $7.72 trillion, more than the “gross state product” of 37 entire states. The Brookings Institute’s Metropolitan Policy Program has attracted attention to its focus on a “metro nation” — the finding that the nation’s top 100 metro regions, while they encompass just 12 percent of the nation’s land area, are home to 65 percent of its population, 68 percent of all American jobs, 70 percent of research universities, 77 percent of knowledge economy jobs, and 96 percent of venture capital funding.
Surely there could be real dividends if our government — national and state – were to adopt a strong system reform focused on metro regions, coordinating departments’ outreach and funding that clear away bureaucratic roadblocks. But there’s a critical problem: standing between the federal colossus and the metro regions — the state governments.
As the semi-sovereign bodies that actually founded the United States, states exercise nearly total power over their local governments — setting city and county boundaries, decreeing revenue systems, and setting regulatory frameworks. Many localities are members of COGS (local councils of governments — represented nationally by the National Association of Regional Councils), but states are free to disregard any recommendations the COGs may make.
The states’ role was thrown into the spotlight in plans to distribute federal economic stimulus funds approved by Congress in winter 2009. Given wide latitude in distributing the billions of dollars in new federal assistance, some states — Missouri and Washington, for example — initially failed to provide even one dollar of their transportation allotment to their major metro regions. And there remain complaints that states are seriously shortchanging metro areas in allocation of the funds.
While regions have become the completely obvious reality, most states do nothing to encourage innovative regional governance. Oregon, California, Florida, Virginia and Minnesota are among the few exceptions — and even their records are mixed.
And what’s even more disturbing, states often provide barriers rather than inducements, to joint strategies, joint powers agreements, shared taxation, shared revenue or merged services among the many governmental units that constitute metropolitan regions.
Typically, metropolitan leaders complain of outright state-level hostility to their interests, especially in legislatures — notwithstanding the reality that metros, with their immense economic weight and tax yields, are literally the states’ “cash cows.”
Recent examples: Georgia and Illinois have dragged heels in permitting their globally famed top metro regions (Atlanta and Chicago) to conduct referenda to ask their own citizens if their willing to be taxed to build up (or in Chicago’s case, sustain) a serious transit system. The New York Legislature blocked the congestion pricing system proposed for Manhattan as a key part of the city’s progressive “PlaNYC,” a sustainability-based action program establishing a model for the entire tri-state New York region (and, arguably, the entire United States).
Federal transportation legislation since the early 1990s has carved out a role for MPOs — “Metropolitan Policy Organizations” — to formulate transportation improvement plans for their areas, and to designate individual projects. (Some MPOs are operated by the traditional COGs, others not). A scattering of MPOs (Albany, Dallas, Hartford, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, for example) have built up staff expertise to write the complex regional transportation plans mandated by federal law. But many state transportation departments exercise significant control over MPO operations, and evaluations of most MPOs indicate serious professional shortcomings. A number of states, rather than shaping MPO boundaries to match true regions, have succumbed to parochial pressures and allowed MPOs to be splintered between sections of the metro area, making true regional decision-making virtually impossible. Another problem is that many states disproportionately allocate MPO board slots, relative to actual population, so that they grossly favor suburban over center city areas. A final problem: overwhelming shares of federal transportation dollars are allocated directly to state transportation departments, leaving a very small portion of the funding actually controlled by MPOs.
The problems of state-regional relationships go far beyond transportation. In a dawning metropolitan era, they represent a fundamental problem in American federalism and governance, calling for systemic analysis and new approaches.
