Tuesday, June 18, 2002
One city may be better off than another, but 'this whole region is lagging,' speaker says.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
SHARON, Pa. -- Unified urban areas tend to have more economic clout and achieve more rewards for their residents, experts told a public forum on the proposed consolidation of municipalities in the Shenango Valley.
"It's always a good idea to use the taxpayer's dollar as efficiently as you can. But the issue is not a question of greater governmental efficiency. The issue is one of greater regional effectiveness," said David Rusk, former mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., and a nationally known champion of regional strategies.
In his book, "In Cities Without Suburbs," he contends that areas that create metropolitan governments through consolidation or annexation are economically more robust and less segregated by social class and race.
About the forum
Rusk and John Powell, a professor at the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School, spoke to an audience of more than 100 people Monday evening at Penn State University's Shenango Campus. The occasion was a forum on the social and economic justice implications of the proposed consolidation of five Shenango Valley communities into one.
The forum, with an audience including clergy and their parishioners and local government leaders, was sponsored by Shenango Valley Initiative -- an interfaith organization devoted to community improvement and social justice.
"The current arrangement of small fragmented governments competing with each other for shrinking resources simply won't work," Powell said. "There are a number of ways of addressing the fragmentation that's going on. Consolidation is one, and there are a number of ways of consolidating. If you do it right, everybody wins," he said.
Rusk and Powell made their remarks after touring Farrell, Hermitage, Sharon, Sharpsville and Wheatland -- the five communities whose proposed consolidation into one municipality has been studied for more than two years by the 25-member Shenango Valley Intergovernmental Study Committee. Such a consolidation would require the approval of voters in the affected communities in a referendum.
Question raised
A man in the audience wondered how Hermitage would benefit economically from consolidating with surrounding communities. "This whole region is lagging, and Hermitage is, in a sense, lagging with it," compared to other similar metropolitan areas, Rusk said.
"A great deal of Hermitage's growth is through the transfer of businesses that already exist in the region from the older communities to Hermitage," he said. Referring to the recent relocation of a major furniture store from Sharon to Hermitage, Rusk asked rhetorically, "For the region as a whole, is it progress?"
Powell echoed some of the same sentiments. "It looks like Hermitage is winning over Farrell when you compare the two to each other. But the competition is not between Hermitage and Farrell. It's between this region and other regions around the country. And in that regard, you're losing. The total population is declining. The total commercial base is declining," Powell explained.
Regions with more unified local governments have experienced significantly more overall growth in population, jobs, personal and family income, and sharper declines in housing segregation as compared with more fragmented regions, Rusk said.
Rusk stopped short of promising instant progress if a Shenango Valley consolidation occurs.
Had such a consolidation occurred 50 years ago, it likely would not have prevented the closing of Westinghouse and Sharon Steel, but would have allowed the Valley to respond faster and more effectively to the economic crisis posed by the closings, he said.