Merger Politics Local Government Consolidation In Tidewater Virginia

The Hampton Roads area of Virginia changed dramatically during the 20th century as it transformed from rural farmland to suburban sprawl. Two cities in the region, Newport News and Warwick, employed a policy known as consolidation. While many cities throughout the United States utilized consolidation in the post-war era, the merging of Newport News and Warwick illustrates how consolidations manipulated and altered the landscape of the city. The modern city of Newport News is split between a large, prosperous, suburban area mainly populated by whites, and a small urban, declining, urban area mainly populated by blacks. The Newport News/Warwick consolidation illuminates the policies of white flight and suburbanization. The first chapter explores the history of Newport News and Warwick and the move towards consolidation. While Warwick had been a rural county for centuries, Newport News became an established city in 1896. During the post-war era, problems arose between the two polities. Newport News began to suffer from overcrowding, while Warwick was politically and economically weak. At first, Warwick opposed merging with Newport News, even establishing itself as a city. Eventually, the civic leaders of the two cities realized that they needed each other. The second chapter delves into the consolidation effort between Newport News and Warwick. While the majority of people from both cities approved the merger, the rural white population of Warwick and the urban black population of Newport News opposed consolidation as a threat to their political power. Ultimately, the pro-consolidation forces won, and the two cities merged. The third chapter analyzes the immediate effects from the consolidation. While the white population left the former Newport News area, the black population were forced to stay within the confines of the old city. The black population moved into public housing, and the former Newport News area suffered from a lack of city benefits. By contrast the former Warwick area grew in both population and power, until the old county became the dominant section of the city. The forth chapter explains modern day Newport News, a city that is still divided into two separate areas.

Although city-county consolidation has been urged for years as a solution for many urban problems, relatively few communities have come to the point of offering such an option to the voters and in most of the communities that have done so, the voters have rejected the idea. In 1972 the voters of Lexington and Fayette County, Kentucky, approved consolidation by a better than two-to- one margin. W. E. Lyons examines this victory for consolidation, comparing the Lexington setting with other places where merger has been attempted. For the first time in the literature, the details of actually drafting a consolidated city-county charter are described. Lyons shows that if either the city or the county government is hostile, the resulting problems are sufficient to stymie the whole undertaking. Even under the most favorable of conditions it is difficult for a commission of thirty citizens to develop the skills and maintain the patience and spirit of compromise necessary to produce a workable charter, acceptable to all members. This examination of a successful consolidation fight includes the results of several surveys of Lexington voters before the referendum and an analysis of the election results. Lyons's description of the campaign strategies used and the reasons for their selection will be especially valuable to leaders considering consolidation in their own communities.

City-country consolidation builds upon the Progressive tradition of favoring structural reform of local governments. This volume looks at some important issues confronting contemporary efforts to consolidate governments and develops a theoretical approach to understanding both the motivations for pursuing consolidation and the way the rules guiding the process shape the outcome. Individual chapters consider the push for city-county consolidation and the current context in which such decisions are debated, along with several alternatives to city-county consolidation. The transaction costs of city-county consolidation are compared against the costs of municipal annexation, inter-local agreements, and the use of special district governments to achieve the desired consolidation of services. The final chapters compare competing perspectives for and against consolidation and put together some of the pieces of an explanatory theory of local government consolidation.

Although a frequently discussed reform, campaigns to merge a major municipality and county to form a unified government fail to win voter approval eighty per cent of the time. One cause for the low success rate may be that little systematic analysis of consolidated governments has been done. In City–County Consolidation, Suzanne Leland and Kurt Thurmaier compare nine city–county consolidations—incorporating data from 10 years before and after each consolidation—to similar cities and counties that did not consolidate. Their groundbreaking study offers valuable insight into whether consolidation meets those promises made to voters to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of these governments. The book will appeal to those with an interest in urban affairs, economic development, local government management, general public administration, and scholars of policy, political science, sociology, and geography.