Consolidating Governments Would Leave Black Ferguson With Even Less Power

Even if you define the phrase St. Louis
region narrowly, so it covers just the City of St. Louis and
the adjacent St. Louis County, the place contains 91
municipalities, many of them microscopic. There is also a patchwork
of school districts and other local authorities whose jurisdictions
do not precisely match the municipal boundaries. And then there’s
the area’s private “governments,” hundreds of urban and
suburban street
associations owned and run by their residents.

Technocrats are always urging the region to consolidate into a
more centralized system, and they’ve rushed to link their cause to
the dysfunctions on
display in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. They’ve
offered some odd arguments in the process. The strangest of these
appeared in The New York Times, where former Missouri
state senator Jeff Smith wrote this:

there’s a potential solution that could help Ferguson
reinvest in itself and also help African-Americans compete for a
bigger share of the pie: consolidation with surrounding
municipalities, many of which face similar challenges. The St.
Louis region has seen some preliminary support for the idea, with
resistance concentrated in smaller political units whose leaders
are loath to surrender control.

Consolidation would help strapped North County communities avoid
using such a high percentage of their resources for expensive
public safety overhead, such as fire trucks. It could also empower
the black citizens of Ferguson. Blacks incrementally gained power
in St. Louis City in part because its size facilitates broader
coalitions and alliances. Another benefit of consolidation is the
increased political talent pool. Many leaders just aren’t
interested in running a tiny municipality.

If Smith is calling for a full-fledged amalgamation of all the
region’s municipalities, his idea is bizarre. There’s no way
consolidating the majority-black City of St. Louis into the larger,
majority-white St. Louis County is going to give African Americans
more political power. Neither would it help to wipe out the county
towns where the mayor and other officials are black. (Yes, such places
exist.) And
given that Ferguson has a black majority, isn’t a small-town
government an easier foe for organizers to target than the vaster,
whiter metro area?

Perhaps Smith just wants to fuse the towns found in
Ferguson’s corner of the county. But that suggestion seems off-base
too. Many of these communities are already sharing the costs of
various services without sacrificing their sovereignty. (In
practice, governmentally splintered regions like St. Louis feature
a web of contracts between different jurisdictions, letting local
governments take advantage of economies of scale without giving up
control. Many of these towns do not, in fact, own fire trucks.)
When the locals do sacrifice their sovereignty, the
results haven’t always been good for black power. MSNBC
reports that one reason whites have been running Ferguson’s
schools is because “Ferguson shares a board with neighboring
Florissant, which is mostly white.”

Indeed, in Ferguson blacks would have more power if the town’s
system of government was less centralized. From that same
MSNBC report:

For council elections, the city has three districts, or
wards, and each ward elects two members each. That means it’s
edging toward an “at-large” voting system, in which there are no
districts at all, and all candidates face the whole electorate.
Numerous jurisdictions around the country have used such systems to
reduce minority representation, since it makes it harder for
numerical minorities to elect their preferred
candidates.

At any rate, the main reason whites run majority-black Ferguson
is because the town
only recently acquired a black majority; the new arrivals
aren’t well-organized politically yet, and many of them are not
registered to vote. Given what has happened over the last two
weeks, that is likely to change in the near future. Indeed, it’s

already changing now. Whatever other barriers they face, blacks
in Ferguson has the advantage of numbers; consolidation won’t help
with that, and in fact would hurt.

There may well be restrictions on local sovereignty that would
be good for St. Louis. (According to Smith, the area’s police
forces “rely disproportionately on traffic citation revenue,”
leading to excessive and discriminatory traffic stops. If so, state
or county rules restricting towns’ powers in this area would be in
order.) But broadly speaking, decentralization is not the problem
here—and centralization certainly isn’t the road to black
empowerment.

Bonus links: The great scholarly defenders of
“polycentric” local government are Vincent and Elinor Ostrom; for
an overview of their work on the subject, go
here. For a relevant passage from Jane Jacobs’ The Death of
Life of Great American Cities, go
here. And for a sign that more solutions can be found in
grassroots mobilization than urban consolidation, check out

this dispatch from the suburbs of Atlanta, where the government
is splintered but blacks have made much more political
progress.