The Problem of Democratic Anchorage for Interlocal Agreements

More attention must be given to the performance of interlocal agreements (ILAs) as they continue to grow in popularity as a mode of service provision in U.S. cities. This study scrutinizes the democratic performance of ILAs, drawing theoretical insights from the literature on network governance. Because ILAs shift service responsibility from individual cities to multijurisdictional arrangements, these tools may lead to complaints about the responsiveness of the service to the public in the individual units served by the multijurisdictional arrangement. Thus, democratic anchorage is central to assessments of ILA performance. This study evaluates democratic anchorage by identifying concerns with ILAs in interviews with a sample of local elected officials in Michigan. The concerns then are discussed in the context of the institutional collective action framework, a theoretical foundation that has become popular for explaining the emergence of ILAs and regional cooperation.

Small Town Civic Structure and Interlocal Collaboration for Public Services

Local governments are responsible for financing and providing an array of public services ranging from police, fire, and emergency medical services to streets, parks, and water. Two mechanisms, civic structure and interlocal collaboration, have the potential to solve the problem of providing high–quality public services in the face of declining resources and increasing needs. We find that civic structure—citizen engagement in solving public problems—is positively and strongly associated with perceived quality of small town public services. Although many rural towns have entered into service agreements with other local governments, this approach is not significantly associated with citizen ratings of overall service quality. Citizens seem to prefer their local government directly providing police services rather than entering into interlocal agreements. This suggests that leaders and heads of departments providing public services need to carefully assess which services are most appropriately shared across governments to achieve cost savings and which support sense of community and would be better provided directly.