This is not going to be an in-depth, highly researched & linked article. This is a fast brain dump on why in the great Boston Metro area we either need a “Capital Region Government” or Boston should just annex everything within Route 128.
- A great piece in the Globe today by Diedre Fernandes talks about how our region’s housing stock is out of sync with the regions shifting demographics. The gist is: young people are moving to the city for schools & jobs and are taking over the housing stock that used to house Boston’s working families. These families are moving to the suburbs which is driving up costs in those area. Empty nesters in the suburbs want to downsize, but zoning in their towns means there’s little smaller housing stock without changing towns or moving closer into the city. If empty nesters move into the city, it increases housing competition between them, the existing residents, and the earlier mentioned Millennials to further drive up housing costs. This cycle is unsustainable but won’t be solved by any one town/city government as this is a regional issue. Too many town/city zoning boards, development agencies, planning agencies and politicos make it structurally impossible to solve this problem.
- Budgets & inefficiencies – Every city & town maintains similar sets of agencies, including police, fire, schools, Public Works, health & social agencies, IT, city/town managers etc. Every agency means different unions, different contracts, different pensions, different executives – huge overhead costs that could be reduced by merging municipalities at some level. Similarly, there are great operational efficiency that can be gained by merging towns & cities – deploying snow crews to the hardest impacted areas, deploying police & fire resources across a broader area as needed (Fires & crime don’t stop at municipal borders), bringing scale to social services agencies.
- The MBTA – Should the MBTA be beholden to state politicians or to the region it serves? The MBTA is a great engine for the Capital Region’s growth & development. A Regional level government with taxation abilities would allow for problems to be solved by the region, for the region.
Are there examples of this around the world? Sure – you can look at areas like LA County in California where certain services are provided at the county level and others are the city level.
However I think a model that would better suit the New England Town model that our region is heavily based on would be that of the Greater London Authority in the UK. The GLA acts as an umbrella government, who’s primary responsibility is providing transit, police, fire service & strategic planning to the region, leaving local issues such as education, social services, libraries and others to the local boroughs of London. A model such as this would let us have a government body to really plan for the future of the Capital Region, not just each individual city & town. As has been long discussed here on BMG, many cities & towns in our region have a hard time looking beyond their borders and have barely functional local political leadership (Looking at your Cambridge). A GLA style body for Boston may not solve all of these problems, but at least it would elevate those that need to be addressed at a regional level.
Of course the alternative is we can go back to Boston annexing everything in sight (another idea I believe I read here on BMG). With a bit more devolution of power from the State, this could achieve the same end.
I don’t see either of these ideas being popular with our local or state pols because it would diminish their power & influence. But if you look at most major cities around the world that have experienced rapid growth over the last 50-75 years, those who have grown the most consistently have done it by integrating & streamlining government.
I never got why we abolished it. The fat is really more in the town-level governments. Makes more sense to abolish those and bring back county government than to have the system we have now.
I agree that we should have taken a mend it, don’t end it approach to counties, but I think towns can also be more responsive to very local needs too.
Glad you put your finger on the cause of everybody’s problems.
Look, buddy, if there is a problem where you live, in your city or town, go for it.
Likely you will find that the thing you call “fat” is required by state law, or is someone else’s vital service that just doesn’t happen to benefit you.
But by all means get that fat. It’s going to be a lot easier to do that now than in some hypothetical humngulous mega-county government.
But please do not wreck my town in the process.
The way they’re performed isn’t. Too much duplication among all the small towns that could be sharing resources.
as in, Gosh, there’s a high school in Quincy, why the heck do we need another one on Brockton?
There’s a reason these are called local services.
I think it’s a specialized storm drain truck or something similar.
It was a huge headache to accomplish and it took a selectman who was determined to see if an actual joint activity could occur see to it through. The lack of enthusiasm by everyone else involved was a real barrier, and most of it was “it’s just not done.”
I would be a huge fan of shared services but I would rate the probability of any regionalization actually occurring as close to zero.
Boston, Quincy, and Cambridge are in three different counties. More appropriate might be to work through the MAPC.
n/t
this was a state where there were unincorporated areas between town borders, and counties provided government structure to those areas as is still done in many other states today. Here, in MA, we don’t have that situation. We go from town to town with no areas in between. As the map above shows, the county system is too big and unwieldy to provide those efficiencies of size without also adding a bureaucracy causing more problems than it is worth. That doesn’t say that there aren’t many situations where similar, contiguous or close by towns, that could benefit from a regionalization plan to allow them to share common services, such as police, fire or public works. Why should each town maintain an infrastructure for each service when money could be saved by having one and sharing it with its neighbors? Many already do this with regional school systems. Much of what is preventing this is momentum keeping things as they are, and pride, wanting to have your own x, y, or z department. The key seems to be close proximity and common needs.
Adeas puts it a bit provocatively, but his/her justifications sound similar to what Katz and Bradley are advocating in Metropolitan Revolution, i.e. bringing government up to date by reconfiguring institutions in line with the increasing economic power of metropolitan areas.
I don’t know enough at this point to defend or criticize the argument but I liked this review of Metropolitan Revolution from The Urbanophile. My favorite quote: “Too many policy makers seem to think that America is still a nation of yeoman farmers or that the average American lives in something resembling Mayberry.”
I agree with you, and I agree that Massachusetts needs effective regional government.
Having said that, much of Massachusetts — especially outside I-495 — really DOES resemble Mayberry.
I lived in Dunstable, MA from 1986 to 1998. Even though it was located a short walk from Rt 3 (and its traffic), Dunstable WAS Mayberry. It has not changed significantly since then. When I moved to Dunstable in 1986, the town was still reverberating from the shock of imposing street addresses on every property. The chief of police had been in that role for 30 years. Everybody knew everybody. New housing (like the new 4-BR colonial we bought) was identified in town by the owner of the farm who had sold the land to the developer (“Oh, you live in one of those houses built on Bill Johnson’s land”).
I wouldn’t describe the rural population of Massachusetts as “yeoman farmers”, but a great many of our 361 cities and towns truly DO resemble Mayberry.
I’m pretty sure 351 is the number of incorporated communities.
You’re absolutely correct.
You’re right. When I talk with neighbors descriptions are prefaced with former owners, and if I say take a right at the “four corners” everyone will know what I mean. We have Dresser Hill road and Dresser Hill road #2, which leads to what was a working farm until 7-8 years ago. Guess they couldn’t think of a new name.
My brother lives near Partridge Hill on the SCR and I’ve never seen a bird there.
Seriously, those of us in small towns run things the way we like thanks to town meeting. The town across the river from us is bonkers, and their tax rate is twice as high. Why would we want to do things the way they do?