As it happened, though, Duff had stumbled into the perfect job for his semi-retirement. In most of the country, a superintendent of schools faces marathon hours of frenetic work. In much of Maine, including Monmouth, it's a part-time job. Duff works a couple of days a week.
The reason is simple enough: Duff oversees only three schools. All told, those schools -- kindergarten through 12th grade -- teach roughly 750 students. As a result, there's only so much work for a superintendent to do.
That's all about to change. Monmouth is merging with four other school districts. The Maine legislature, at the urging of Governor John Baldacci, last year approved a law that's heralded as the most significant overhaul of Maine's public schools in 50 years. The law will force each district to include at least 2,500 students, except in isolated areas, where the minimum will be 1,000. Districts that don't meet those requirements will have to consolidate or face cuts in state aid. The goal is to reduce Maine's 290 school administrative units to 80 or fewer.
Why would a governor care so much about the boundaries of school districts? Baldacci argues that small districts are inefficient. When a few tiny schools have to pay for a superintendent, a special education coordinator and a substantial support staff, fewer dollars end up in the classroom. Bigger districts, he says, are better. Rather than have five Leon Duffs, why not have just one?
That's an argument that is resonating with leaders in other states -- and with regard to general-purpose governments, just as much as school districts. Indiana lawmakers are thinking about eliminating townships. New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine proposed a budget this year that would have eliminated state aid for small towns -- a not-so-subtle push for them to consolidate with larger neighbors. New York and Ohio are looking at similar proposals. The common thread is that state officials in many places see local government as bloated and fractured. The result is a tense debate between states and localities over just what local government should look like.
Smaller and Smaller
Maine has been hit by a decades-long demographic storm. The population has been getting older to the point that the state now has the highest median age in the country. The number of K-12 students has plummeted from 250,000 in the 1970s to fewer than 200,000 today.As this happened, school districts remained in place. Fewer students hasn't meant fewer districts -- or fewer administrators. The state's per-pupil administrative spending is well above the national average. "We're having smaller and smaller schools," says Elinor Goldberg, the president of the Maine Children's Alliance, "and being less and less efficient. If we can reduce administrative costs, we could retain the additional costs for improving what's available in the classroom."
While Maine's demographic dilemma is unusual, the story of outdated local governments is a familiar one, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. In many places, municipal boundaries have been set in stone since the horse-and-buggy era.
The result: structures of local government that no one would design if they were starting from scratch today. Take New York. The state has cities, towns and villages, with each type of government covered by different state laws. But there's not any rationale to which are cities and which are towns. Hempstead, New York, on Long Island, has a population of more than 750,000. If it were a city, it would have the 15th largest population in the country, ahead of Boston, Seattle, Denver and Washington, D.C. It's not. It's a town.
What's more, New York has some of strangest layering of local government around. New York City has one level of general-purpose local government (the five boroughs have almost no authority). Other places in the same state, though, have two layers -- city and county -- or even three layers -- county, town and village.
When local government is divided into that many layers, it tends to be extremely messy. Indiana has 92 counties, 117 cities, 451 towns and 1,008 townships, not to mention 293 school districts, 239 library districts and 886 other special districts. There's plenty of reason to doubt that slicing up municipal responsibility in so many ways is a recipe for sound management.
For decades, in Indiana and in other multi-layered states, there has been talk about bringing coherence to the crazy quilt. Local governments themselves have been slow to act, however. The truth is that the forces preventing these governments from merging willingly -- whether it's two school districts, a city and a county, or anything else -- are quite strong. Almost inevitably, consolidation discussions are marred by turf battles. If one government is wealthier, it often won't want to combine with a place that has a weaker tax base. Elected officials often resist, out of fear that combining two councils into one leaves fewer offices to run for.
Donald Boyd, a senior fellow at New York's Rockefeller Institute of Government, watched a proposed merger of Buffalo and surrounding Erie County fizzle a few years ago. "The political obstacles are huge," he says. "You're far more likely to rile up voters and not get it approved than you are to pass it." Nationally, there are only 38 consolidated city-county governments. School district mergers are far more common, although no less politically combustible.
Those dynamics explain why states are stepping in to push consolidation or, if not that, more sharing of services between municipalities. They're not stepping lightly. Indiana approved property tax cuts and caps this year that Governor Mitch Daniels says are a way of forcing local governments to change the way they do business. The legislature also eliminated most of the state's elected township property assessors, shifting their responsibilities to counties.
That's just the start. With Daniels' support, a bipartisan commission proposed wholesale local government restructuring last December. Under the plan, school districts with fewer than 2,000 students would be required to consolidate. The number of library districts would be cut to 92 in order to mirror county lines. Most dramatically, the township governments -- which currently provide fire and EMS services and assistance for the poor -- would be done away with entirely. "When you come up with a recommendation that says we should eliminate over 5,000 elected officials," says John Krauss, the executive director of the commission, "that's rather bold." While property taxes dominated the legislature's time this year, next year's debate is expected to turn to the consolidation issues.
Stepping on Tradition
What exactly the Indiana legislature will do, however, is anyone's guess. Elsewhere, local officials have succeeded in pushing back against these sorts of plans. Governor Corzine was badly rebuffed when he proposed to eliminate state aid for New Jersey towns with fewer than 5,000 residents and slash it in half for towns of 10,000 or fewer. When Bill Dressel heard Corzine deliver that message in his annual budget address, he was shocked. "I almost fell out of my seat," says Dressel, the executive director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities. "I almost fell out of the gallery and onto the Assembly floor."The shock was shared by municipal officials. Dozens of mayors railed against the plan in rallies around the state, condemning the service cuts that would be necessary without state aid. The battle between the governor and the mayors turned into one of the hottest political disputes of the year in New Jersey. Ultimately, Corzine backed down, restoring most of the aid and turning his attention to a commission that will study future mergers.
The result in New Jersey isn't an aberration. When former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack pushed a consolidation plan a few years ago, it got nowhere. In Maine, Baldacci initially wanted just 26 school districts. He had to compromise with the legislature on 80, and still the plan has been a major source of controversy. Nebraska and Arkansas have approved school district merger plans, but only after years of contentious debate.
When pushing back, municipalities have a two-word mantra: "local control." They see states as meddling in the affairs of local government. And they fear that, under consolidation, communities that always have made decisions for themselves will be forced to abide by the dictates of outsiders. Peter Edgecomb, a state representative from northern Maine, worries about parents who will have to travel 100 miles to school board meetings. Superintendent Duff describes the sentiment of many Mainers: " 'I graduated from that school, and my parents and my grandparents,'" he quotes them as saying. "You're taking away their history. That becomes a huge issue."
To many state officials, those objections reflect an antiquated view of local government. The town pride that comes from having your own school district or township, the argument goes, isn't worth the higher taxes that result from inefficient or duplicative local government. "The provision of municipal services should have nothing to do with history, tradition and culture," says Joseph Doria, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs. "They have to do with how you can help people."
Whether consolidation is actually the best way to help people is a matter of significant debate. Supporters argue that it creates clearer lines of accountability -- the public knows where to go for services and knows whom to blame when things go wrong. They also say that bigger governments provide better services. Not every school district in Maine can afford its own art teacher or computer lab. The hope is that once districts join together, the quality of instruction and the range of resources will be more consistent from place to place.
Much of the debate, though, ultimately bogs down on the question of cost savings. Donald Boyd of the Rockefeller Institute studied the issue. "There's real research in the case of school districts," he says, "that up to some point there are cost savings from consolidating small, rural school districts." The same research doesn't exist for city-county consolidations, however. There simply have been too few to come to firm conclusions.
The fairest assessment is that, while consolidations CAN save money, they don't INEVITABLY save money. As intuitive as the argument for economies of scale is, there are complicating factors. Sometimes, two governments can save more through collaboration -- joint purchasing agreements, for example -- than through merger. In Maine, school districts worry about the implications for teacher pay. When two districts combine, does the lower-paying district have to match the salaries of the higher-paying one? It's practical concerns such as that, as much as arguments over local control, that have made consolidation such a tough sell.
Offering Carrots
Given the opposition, it's not clear that states are pushing consolidation in the right way. Part of the reason they became involved in the first place is that, when municipalities are left to their own devices, they find the political obstacles insurmountable. To date, though, the obstacles have been nearly as great when states are doing the pushing.New York is trying a different approach -- more carrot than stick. For a few years now, it has been operating a program that offers grants and technical assistance for municipalities that are willing to collaborate with each other. In May, the state handed out nearly $14 million in grants. The money has been used to fund everything from the joint purchase of street sweeping machines to studies of outright consolidation between a town and city.
Under the New York system, says Paul Moore, of the University of Albany's Government Law Center, consolidation happens "as a result of local initiative. It isn't something the state tells them to do. It's not just some planner somewhere saying that it would be a good idea to look at garbage collection in five adjoining towns."
New York is now evaluating whether grants that were approved in past years have had their intended effects -- whether they cut costs and improved efficiency. Officials hope that if there are demonstrated benefits to collaboration, more municipalities will want to participate.
Other states are wondering whether New York might have the right idea. Despite the Maine legislature's mandate, progress on consolidating school districts there is moving slowly. "'Consolidate or else' isn't working," says Goldberg of the Maine Children's Alliance. She would prefer that the state revamp its consolidation law with a New York-like emphasis on incentives rather than penalties.
However, Martha Freeman, director of Maine's State Planning Office, notes that the state pumped $800 million in new money into school spending just five years ago. The state now pays 55 percent of the cost of K-12 education. Given that commitment, Freeman argues that it's reasonable to expect school districts to arrange themselves in the most efficient way possible, even if they're not completely happy about it.
The truth, though, is that states don't have to choose between giving local governments a helping hand or a swift kick in the butt. New York is doing both. New Jersey has a grant program that's similar. Indiana's reform commission wants to create a state office to provide technical assistance to local governments. And Maine is helping school districts with the logistics of merging. The message, it seems, is that if localities are going to come together, state and local government will need to join forces to make it happen.
