Self-Organizing Special Districts: A Tool for Community Change and Development

Can self-organizing special districts created from the bottom up be a tool for community change and development? Focusing on community services districts in California, this study introduces the context in which communities opt out of a county service system to reshape their governing structure for better representation. The empirical part measures their effectiveness, using single-family home sale prices as an impact metric. Leveraging multi-level difference-in-difference hedonic regression methods, the analysis shows that district formation increases the prices annually up to 16 percent, compared to both the surrounding and distant county service areas, indicating their efficacy as a tool for community change and development.

District Reliance by Service Function: A Study of Public Financing of American Special Districts

Over the past several decades, special districts have proliferated and become the most rapidly growing type of local governments in the U.S. This study provides an exploratory investigation of special district finance reliance from two aspects, including expenditure reliance of general–purpose governments on special districts’ service delivery and financing mode of special districts. Using financial data collected from the Bureau of Census, this study provides detailed descriptive analyses on temporal trends and geographical patterns of expenditure reliance and revenue financing mode for four service functions. From the perspective of expenditure reliance, this study shows that special districts have replaced the role of general–purpose governments. In terms of revenue modes, special districts tend to rely on user fees, equating payers and beneficiaries of services. Moreover, this study shows that on which revenue sources the districts rely the most vary by service function and geography.

Bottom-Up or Top-Down Local Service Delivery? Assessing the Impacts of Special Districts as Community Governance Model

This article assesses the impacts of bottom-up local governing institutions relative to top-down bureaucracies in local service delivery. Community services districts (CSDs) in California, a class of special districts that provides various neighborhood-level services, are examined to answer this question. An innovative characteristic of this institutional form is that it is residents who create them through a grass-root collective action to achieve a bottom-up governance structure, after opting out from a county service system. With changes in residential property values as performance metrics, the quantitative analysis utilizes district formation events and features a hedonic difference-in-difference regression. The results show that the creation of CSDs produces more significant impacts on property values than county authorities do. Yet, the effects are heterogeneous across the communities when the analysis is further drilled down to each district. The exploratory qualitative case study then uses interview data with district managers and document analysis to unveil what administrative factors explain the success and failure trajectory of bottom-up institution management. The case study identifies such factors as critical codeterminants, including managerial and board leadership, clarity of a problem statement, public support, and intergovernmental coordination with county and state agencies.

A Network Autonomy Framework: Reconceptualizing Special District Autonomy in Polycentric Systems

The widespread proliferation of special districts and their role in producing and delivering public goods and services has been well documented. Each new entity further fragments government authority, and thus their autonomy is a critical determinant of how local governance systems function. Existing theories of special district autonomy emphasize formal institutional attributes such as election structure and state restrictions. We argue that this approach does not fully incorporate how relational dynamics such as functional interdependence, interest alignment, and social capital affect how special districts fit within regional polycentric governance systems. We propose a Network Autonomy Framework for local governments that focuses on relational dynamics between co-located1 governments and demonstrate an example of how this framework can be applied to a metropolitan region. By understanding how co-located governments relate to one another, we can gain a deeper understanding of special districts’ role in local governance systems and advance propositions as to how they will affect a variety of local policy outcomes.