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More Government Performance Project reports
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From Governing’s
February 2002 issue
How the grading is doneCounty grades at a glance Counties that received A’s The data behind the grades The counties, by the numbers Publisher’s message
Grading the Counties 2002
By Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene
In the end, the county chose to raise taxes 15 percent. Maybe the apathy had nothing to do with it. Then again, maybe it did.
Either way, the level of citizen interest in Mecklenburg County’s affairs is roughly equivalent to the inattention that prevails in county government almost everywhere in the nation. In many places, it’s worse. In Dallas County, Texas, for example, there is an annual public hearing to set the tax rate for the year. It’s advertised on the Web and in the newspaper by law. “Nobody has spoken at the hearing in five years,” says Budget Director Ryan Brown.
F. Thomas Ament, the Milwaukee County executive, likes to point out that the budget and services provided by his government are greater than the budget and services provided by the city of Milwaukee. “But the profile of the city is higher,” Ament concedes. “Many of the media and newspaper people grew up covering the city, and they still relate more to a mayor than to a county executive.”
Size — even enormous size — is no guarantor of public attention. Los Angeles County’s 10 million people make it the nation’s most populous local jurisdiction. It has more people than all but eight states, and a land area bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Yet even local residents frequently become confused over just who’s a county supervisor and who’s on the Los Angeles city council. The supervisors, among the most powerful public officials in America, still manage to operate below the radar much of the time.
When there’s evidence of urban revival, as there has been in many places over the past few years, mayors can count on a large share of credit and favorable publicity. Counties hit the news in a major way only when there’s a scandal. And although most are clean and well run these days, it’s inevitable each year that a handful will get in trouble and ensure that the scraps of information most people have about county government will be negative.
But while the media and most of the electorate continue to ignore counties — except to mock them for the occasional bad apple — the fact is that they are becoming more important players in American government with each passing year. As the state and federal governments have pulled back on funding in areas such as health care, aid to the poor and criminal justice, it is counties — much more than states and cities — that are generally obligated to move in and fill the gap. “More and more,” says John Saros, director of children’s services in Franklin County, Ohio, “we’re dealing with kids and families at the local level with less and less state assistance.” The closing of residential state mental health centers has added to the local burden. At the same time, federal money that used to fund programs for unruly children and their families has dried up. “Those dollars have gone away,” says Saros, “leaving us more and more reliant on property-tax dollars.”
While this has been going on, the other fundamental chores of county government have only increased. Counties continue to run airports, roads, bridges, water systems and sewer systems. In many places, they provide basic municipal services to unincorporated areas, including sanitation, public safety and fire control. Some counties serve as funding sources for schools and mass transit.
And an increasing number of the nation’s largest counties are moving more deeply than ever into economic development. It was Hamilton County, Ohio, that secured funding for new stadiums for the Cincinnati baseball and football teams, seizing the lead role from the city of Cincinnati and drawing on support from the state.
More than states or cities, counties deal on a day-to-day basis with all the other levels of government. Their funding streams are overwhelmingly provided by the federal and state governments, which rely on them to perform a multiplicity of tasks. Yet they are continually squeezed by the governments above and below them. “We’re at the end of the food chain in terms of the budget,” explains Mark Norris, director of finance in Sacramento County. “The state takes care of itself first. There are 400 cities in California that have a stronger political position than we do. The counties are the whipping child of the state, and we get what’s left over. We’re the first place to go to make cuts. When the state budget was tight in recent years, they took 9 percent from cities and 50 percent from the counties.”
The same is true in Wisconsin, says David Meissner, president of Milwaukee’s Public Policy Forum: “The county is a creature of the state,” Meissner says, “and that’s one of its major problems. It is not sovereign like a major city. Therefore, it is beholden to the state for what it does and for its financing. The major problem that Milwaukee County has faced over the years is that it is given mandates by the state to do certain things and then the state doesn’t fund them adequately.”
In New York State, where counties are generally required to pay 25 percent of Medicaid costs, the overall county share of those costs is around $4 billion. In some big counties, such as Monroe, where Rochester is located, paying for Medicaid can take up more than 40 percent of all property-tax revenue. And the state’s demands are only getting heavier. Last year, the legislature passed Family Health Plus, which grants health insurance to about 620,000 people ineligible for Medicaid. Counties are being told to cover 25 percent of that as well.
To make matters worse, New York State passes its budget late every year, wreaking havoc with every county’s ability to make accurate revenue estimates. The state’s delay in delivering cash to its localities was one of the factors forcing Monroe County to borrow $60 million in short-term loans last year.
Other counties have been similarly frustrated. “Departments know,” says an official in suburban Westchester County, north of New York City, “that they should not include revenues in their budgets that are not signed, sealed and delivered by federal or state government.” But that doesn’t change the fact that Westchester’s public transportation and child care programs — like the ones in any New York county — depend heavily on state funding. In the aftermath of the attacks on New York City last September, it is likely that even the shrinking pot of money previously available to counties will be substantially diverted downstate.
The states aren’t always capricious tyrants when it comes to their relationship with counties. Maryland’s counties are given wide-ranging authority, including the right to determine their own revenue structures. They tend to have reasonably solid financial management, with little interference from the Maryland legislature. County officials in Ohio complain endlessly about the antiquated state regulations that inhibit them from managing efficiently, but they also give the state credit where it’s due. Ohio has obtained a waiver from Washington that gives 14 counties unprecedented flexibility in how they spend their federal child-protection funds. Even California, after years of stiffing its counties on their share of gas-tax dollars, has recently seen fit to pass more of that money down — thus allowing counties to spend more on road maintenance than they have in years.
Naturally, counties also have to deal with their own municipalities — a relationship that can be difficult and even acrimonious. The mayor of West Palm Beach, the largest city in Palm Beach County, Florida, concedes that “the county and our city don’t enjoy a close relationship and have not for some time. There are a lot of issues of conflict. Maybe that’s the natural course of things.”
It’s no surprise that cities and counties should frequently find themselves at odds. They both feed at the same trough as they vie for funding from the state. States often hit their residents with a single sales tax and then divide up the proceeds three ways, among their own needs, those of the counties and those of the cities. As a result, one more dollar for a region’s large cities can equate to one less dollar for the counties.
In Palm Beach County, one of the major issues is a water shortage. The area has suffered from drought conditions for several years. But Florida law gives water-management districts — totally independent from the county — the power to make the crucial decisions. The county administrator has a special assistant for water-management issues to work with the district, but very little ultimate say in what the district actually does.
When there are thousands of miles of roads involved, sometimes responsibilities can shift right between an oak tree and a mossy field. “It’s a hodgepodge,” says Cameron Priebe, director of public services in Michigan’s Wayne County. “I don’t know who designed this system. One road, as it travels through cities, may be county or city property. And it could very well change back and forth from one place to the other.”
Of course, not all the problems that counties face are in their stars — more than a few begin right at home. Many county governments are still run by commissioners who make less for their labors than the people flipping hamburgers at the McDonald’s down the street. Part-time commissioners in Miami-Dade County, for example, make $6,000 a year. In exchange for that money, they have to deal with 31 municipalities, a population of 2.3 million and a budget of close to $5 billion. A typical commission agenda will include more than 200 items. “They don’t have the time to get up to speed on all these issues,” says one local reporter. “It makes for a very inefficient system.”
What’s more, while some county governments have retained stable bodies of leaders, many suffer from frequent turnover. “More than four or five years as a county manager, and you’re an old timer,” says Tom Andrews, who manages Fulton County, in Georgia. Andrews has been manager there for two years; following four others who filled that post during the 1990s.
As with all levels of local government, term limits have had an impact on the way counties do their business — and it hasn’t been good. The biggest negative has come in managing for results. That discipline tends to require an emphasis on the long term, just the opposite of the emphasis that term limits tend to inspire. “Term limits have really changed the electoral focus,” says one official in Santa Clara County, California. “You’re dealing with a board under term limits who need to show results quite quickly in order to show that they had an impact. And when you’re looking at managing for results, you may not be able to see and validate the results of your efforts for a decade or more. They can’t wait that long.”
Perhaps the biggest structural problem confronted by counties, however, is the sheer number of elected officials, many of whom don’t report to the county manager, the commission or any central authority at all. Most counties elect a prosecutor, a clerk and a sheriff. Many choose several others as well. These officials almost invariably claim that their mandate comes directly from the voters, and that they need not accept direction from any administrative body. If they overspend their annual budgets or spend their dollars inefficiently, little can be done by the manager or commission to discipline them.
What this means is that many counties are forced to function more like a confederation than like a unified public institution. When spending reductions are necessary, as they have been this year in most places, it is the agencies under the central government that bear most of the burden. The commissioners can’t easily dictate efficiency to the sheriff, or the prosecutor, but they do have that authority over the health department and the child welfare agency. So that is where the changes tend to be made, regardless of where they logically should be made. “We’re putting on a hiring freeze for our own agencies,” says Bette Meyer, deputy county administrator in Cuyahoga County, “but we can’t tell the other elected officials to do that.”
The plethora of elected officials is a particular headache in information technology. In Cuyahoga County, for instance, the treasurer and the auditor purchased separate financial data systems. The system used by the budget office is aligned with neither one. The human resources system was purchased from yet a fourth vendor. These separate systems can be interfaced through modems and downloads, but that’s far from an efficient way to do business.
Maricopa County, Arizona, where factionalism among the commission and elected officials nearly led to bankruptcy in the mid-1990s, emerged from that crisis with a sense of unity that has made it one of the nation’s best-managed local governments. Departments that handle their budgets efficiently receive “fiscal fitness” awards, and are given extra managerial flexibility as a reward. Those that stray meet with budget officials on a monthly basis. “In the mid-1990s, there wasn’t much of a consequence when departments overspent their budget,” says Tom Manos, the county’s chief financial officer. “It’s a painful process for departments now.”
As the Government Performance Project demonstrates in these pages, the restraints on counties have forced them to become particularly innovative when it comes to financial management, capital management, human resources, managing for results and information technology. Of course, given the wide variety of functions they carry out, and the varying restrictions placed upon them, counties are somewhat more difficult to compare, head to head, than are states or cities. But it’s clear that there’s a great deal of valuable work being done in county governments from coast to coast; and that there’s an immense amount of pride evidenced by the men and women who are doing that work.
In short, Sandy Turk’s mother should know that her daughter works for Cuyahoga County, and has for the last 23 years. And she should be proud of that.
Copyright © 2002, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc. |
very year, as required by law, North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County holds hearings on its new budget. This year’s hearings had good reason to provoke controversy — the recommended budget called for a tax increase of 6 percent. But surprisingly few showed up. “There’s not all that much interest in county government,” says a local newspaper reporter. “Even in the county seat, where they have a huge meeting chamber, it’s typically 80 percent empty.”
ounties are even more diverse than states or cities in terms of governmental structure, financial status and physical composition. Broward County, in Florida, has virtually no unincorporated areas, while Sacramento County in California is about two-thirds unincorporated. Texas counties, such as Dallas and Harris, are almost entirely controlled by the state, with no authority to create their own legislation. Wayne County and Oakland County in Michigan, by contrast, have a great deal of autonomy. “The one uniform thing about county governments,” Milwaukee’s Tom Ament says, “is they’re not uniform.”
he bottom line in city-county-state relations, virtually everywhere in the country, is that counties often have only fragile control over the services they deliver, even where they are held reponsible for part of the outcome. Mecklenburg County, for example, has the responsibility of building and maintaining courthouses. Yet the state of North Carolina is responsible for the personnel — prosecutors, public defenders, court clerks — in those courthouses. And police from Charlotte make the arrests. So, if Charlotte police become more aggressive and step up their arrest rate, Mecklenburg bears the burden. Similarly, if the state doesn’t provide enough money for courthouse staff, jails become crowded with people awaiting trial. Who pays? Mecklenburg.
ny reasonable accounting of the problems and burdens of county government risks creating the impression that the men and women who choose careers in it must be masochists. Maybe some of them would even agree. But while county government isn’t a home for men and women who crave fame or money (not honest money, anyway), the truth is that it continues to attract an impressive supply of talent. |
