Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 21, 1993 TAG: 9306210335
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This is the Pandora's Box of Virginia politics, in which dwell some of the worst demons the state can conjure up - the ugly, divisive, volatile issues of race, annexation and consolidation. But now that we've gone this far, let's lift the lid slowly and see what flies out.
First, what makes Virginia's system of local government so unique?
It's the only state in which cities and counties are mutually exclusive. Here, you're in either one or the other. Both are full-service governments.
In other states, cities overlap counties. And they're not expected to do everything. City residents pay some taxes to their city for city services and some to their county for county services - much the way taxpayers in Vinton or Christiansburg or Blacksburg pay both the town and the county they're still part of. In effect, in other states, cities are more like glorified towns.
There is a simplicity to Virginia's system. "A number of national groups have complimented Virginia," says Del. Richard Cranwell, D-Vinton, a senior member of the House committee on local government, "because there are only three taxing units - counties, cities and towns." Other states have a spaghetti-tangle of boroughs and special tax districts and who knows what all.
But Virginia's system also leads to a legal kind of urban warfare.
Virginia's system was devised in 1869, and the idea in those times was that counties were rural and cities were urban and never the twain should meet, except in annexation court. When urban development sprang up in a county, it seemed only natural for that land to be transferred - annexed - to the city so the city could provide the urban services the county couldn't.
But that 19th-century system didn't envision modern urban sprawl marching across the countryside, the birth of suburban counties providing what used to be considered purely city services such as water and sewers, the deterioration of central cities, black power, white flight - and vicious annexation battles over taxes and control.
In other states, annexation is not as big a deal because when the city annexes part of the county, the city gains a tax base but the county doesn't really lose one. In Virginia, though, what the city wins, the county loses. Forever.
Since World War II, Virginia's cartography has been rearranged by one fight after another in annexation court, in which cities gobbled up big chunks of neighboring counties - the municipal equivalent of the Serbian conquest of Bosnia to create a Greater Serbia. The main difference is, while the Serbs are seeking ethnic purity, Virginia cities simply wanted a bigger tax base.
The threat of annexation induced some localities to cooperate. Albemarle County, hoping to hold Charlottesville at bay, entered into a one-of-a-kind revenue-sharing plan that let Albemarle keep its U.S. 29 shopping mall strip but cut Charlottesville in on some of the tax proceeds.
But more often than not, says John Accordino, an urban policy analyst at Virginia Commonwealth University, the annexation wars discouraged regional cooperation. The cities didn't need to cooperate because they could go to court and get much of what they wanted. And suburban counties were reluctant to ask cities for help, lest that be construed as a sign of weakness that later would be cited as Exhibit A in annexation court.
Even worse, says VCU urban policy analyst John Moeser, regarded as a national expert on the subject of regional cooperation, the bitterness that annexation stirred up between localities made it difficult for them to cooperate even after the case was settled. "All through the 1970s, people in the Richmond area could not forget the 1970 annexation. The environment really was poisoned."
There are economists who believe Virginia's system of multiple local government benefits the economy because it encourages competition among localities.
Roanoke County Supervisor Bob Johnson cites the recent case of Transkrit - which was still playing off bids from both Roanoke city and county the night before it decided to move its New York headquarters to the city - as an example of how competition benefits the valley.
Other urban policy planners say that kind of auctioneer-mentality doesn't work as well in a global economy. Moeser says many Virginia localities became so focused on protecting themselves from each other that they didn't notice the real economic threats aren't just over the county line, but overseas.
To get localities to quit suing each other, the state slapped a temporary moratorium on annexation in the 1970s, and eventually gave the biggest suburban counties - such as Roanoke County - permanent immunity from city land grabs.
"The elimination of annexation was thought to be the thing that would allow governing bodies to cooperate more," Cranwell says. However, "the threat of annexation has been gone for a decade now and it hasn't provided the euphoric attitude we thought it would."
How big a problem does Virginia's system of local government pose to economic development? That's hard to measure, but it's also hard to ignore. A Dallas consultant recently hired by Richmond's business leaders to study that city's slow economic growth zeroed in on the structure of local government as one of the reasons why Richmond is falling behind other Eastern cities.
"Metro Richmond is a term used to describe the area, but it does not reflect any sense of reality," James Crupi wrote in his report. "There is little sense of community unity as a metropolitan areas and almost no cooperation on such critical regional issues as water, the environment, government services, or mass transit."
Furthermore, Crupi concluded, Virginia's system of independent cities and counties "makes it very difficult, even under the best of circumstances, for the city and the counties to work toward regional solutions by leveraging its economies of scale."
Substitute "Roanoke" for "Richmond" and he might have been writing about here: "Thinking about Richmond as a regional entity, particularly if you are in government, goes against legal and political experience. The area has taken on many of the structural characteristics that are evident in the Balkans . . . "
The gap between rich and poor
One reason there's been so little cooperation between localities may be there's little consensus on what should be done.
Roanoke College's most recent Roanoke Valley Poll spotlights that problem: Citizens in different localities have different priorities. In Roanoke, the top concern was jobs. In Salem, it was high taxes. In Roanoke County, it was ineffective government.
If the people can't agree on what the problem is, how can their leaders?
That's why if you ask Roanoke Mayor David Bowers why the city and county can't agree on an issue - any issue - he's bound to blame the 1990 vote in which county residents overwhelmingly rejected a merger with the city.
"People have decided they want separate governments," he says. "Ergo, they have decided on separate agendas and that is an impediment."
Bowers, at times, seems to use the failure of consolidation to explain every city-county disagreement. But there's a deeper issue here: One reason neighboring localities have different agendas is rooted in the social and economic divide between cities and suburban counties.
The suburbs tend to be younger, affluent and mostly white. The cities are older, riven by pockets of poverty and old-money neighborhoods, racially diverse.
Consider the widening gap the 1990 census found in the Roanoke Valley: In Roanoke, 13 percent of the families are below the poverty line, a figure edging up from a decade earlier. In Roanoke County, 3 percent of its citizens were below the poverty line, and that figure was dropping. Other key measures - such as crime rates and teen-age pregnancies - also found the county better off and getting better, the city worse off and worsening.
That's not much different from conditions around the state's capital: In Richmond, 17 percent of the families live below the poverty line. But in Henrico County, it's 4 percent; in Chesterfield, 3 percent.
This disparity between affluent suburbs and impoverished central cities is not unique to Virginia.
"It's the problem in urban America," says Michael Gallis, an urban policy analyst at UNC-Charlotte's Urban Institute.
The difference is, some states allow cities to draw their city limits in ways that more accurately reflect the true scope of the urban area. Charlotte, under North Carolina's annexation laws, has expanded 25 times in the past 33 years - and figures to keep doing so.
Charlotte's ability to expand its borders - and its tax base - "is a big factor is our health," Charlotte Mayor Richard Vinroot says. In effect, Charlotte is a city without suburbs. "The per capita income in Charlotte is greater than the per capita income outside the city limits," Vinroot says. "We're probably the only city that can say that. Usually, it's just the opposite."
Charlotte's ability to annex forces the wealthier suburbs to pay for - and pay attention to - urban problems they might otherwise ignore. "You can't cross the line and hide," Vinroot says, "because we'll be after you."
That relieves much of the financial stress that Virginia's cramped cities feel. In turn, Charlotte has the financial breathing space it needs to take a more regional view, Vinroot says.
If a similar system existed in Virginia, Roanoke could throw out a rope and lasso in most of Roanoke County, and suburban parts of southern Botetourt and western Bedford County - yet those subdivisions still would remain part of those counties.
Instead, under Virginia's system, city limits don't reflect the outer edge of urban development, but are merely signposts marking where the battle lines stood when the armistice on annexation was enacted.
In most cases, the suburbs now are larger than the cities they grew up around. Henrico and Chesterfield each are bigger than Richmond; Virginia Beach is beginning to dwarf Norfolk. Roanoke, at population 96,397, still outsizes Roanoke County, at 79,332 - although with the city shrinking and the county growing, the trend lines suggest the two inevitably will switch positions.
`Apples to oranges!'
The main result of Virginia's annexation freeze is that the state's constricted cities feel increasingly stressed to pay for a disproportionate share of their metro area's welfare costs. The recent report by the Commission on Local Government found that in Virginia's biggest cities, populations are dropping, the demands for social services are soaring, and while tax revenues are growing, they're not growing nearly so fast as in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, analysts says, the suburbs tend to turn their backs on the cities and say, "hey, that's not our problem, we've got our own" - such as paying to build the kind of water supplies that the cities developed long ago.
You can see these roles play out in the Roanoke Valley:
Bidding war for bank jobs. When First Union announced it would transfer 400 jobs to the Roanoke Valley, the city and the county wanted their share. But the city, determined to keep downtown healthy, entered into a bidding war over training money and was so desperate it wound up paying three times what the county did - to get half the jobs.
City wouldn't help on Spring Hollow. Roanoke County needs more water and hoped to persuade Roanoke to pay part of the cost by building a reservoir big enough to supply both it and other localities. But the city, skeptical of the project's financial projections and not willing to spend a cent it didn't have to, said no thanks - leaving the county to pay the whole bill. To this day, some county officials grumble that they're shouldering the entire burden to guarantee everyone in the valley an adequate water supply in the 21st century.
County wouldn't help on Hotel Roanoke. The city had hoped Roanoke County would kick some cash into reopening a valley landmark, the Hotel Roanoke. County supervisors demanded a financial cut in return for investing their money outside the county line, and the city wasn't interested in sharing even a dime. The county kept its money, a point city officials now bring up whenever they want to make the case that the county's not pulling its weight on regional issues.
The Hotel Roanoke excepted, Roanoke County often appears to take a more regional approach than the city - pushing for a regional airport authority; constructing a reservoir big enough to water the entire valley; readily joining with Botetourt County to develop a co-owned library, fire station and industrial park on land straddling the county line, complete with revenue-sharing. But the county can afford to, because it has the land and it knows sooner or later growth will come its way.
Bowers says the city's financial stress brought on by the end of annexation forces it to look out for No. 1 in a way that counties don't.
Take the proposal - advanced by various county figures, from Supervisor Harry Nickens to state Sen. Brandon Bell - that valley governments merge their economic development offices. County officials say, let's do it. City officials won't even talk about it.
"I'm interested in shared responsibility," Bowers retorts. "The city of Roanoke has provided housing for the elderly and needy for 40 years. There's not one jurisdiction in the valley that provides that. . . . If you're going to talk about mergering the sexy, glitzy things [such as economic development], then you must also talk about things that are important to the inner city."
So how about it, Roanoke County, would you help share the costs of the city's social programs in return for a merged economic development office?
"We've gone from apples to oranges!" exclaims Fuzzy Minnix, the chairman of the county Board of Supervisors. "As the mayor knows, we have a lot of different kinds of problems in the city and the county. They address theirs and we address ours."
In a word, no.
"When I begin to hear" talk of the county's responsibility toward the city's social costs, Minnix says, "I hear `consolidation' being drummed up."
What's the cost?
No one's ever measured what effect, if any, Virginia's system of independent cities and counties has had on economic development. While Virginia's system may be unique in the details, though, in practice it's no different from many other states, where cities are unable to expand.
And someone has measured the cost of that.
In his book "Cities Without Suburbs," former Albuquerque, N.M., Mayor David Rusk lays out numbers to make his case that metro areas with central cities that can expand their borders fare economically better than comparable metro areas in the same region with cities that can't expand their borders:
They have faster rates of job creation.
They do a better job of retaining manufacturing jobs, or even creating new ones.
They tend to have a higher-educated work force.
In a separate work, Rusk studied what effect consolidated city-county governments have had on economic growth.
He picked five examples of merged governments, in Jacksonville, Fla.; Indianapolis; Nashville, Tenn.; Lexington, Ky.; and Columbus, Ga.
Next, he identified the half-dozen or so metro areas that were most like them 20 years ago - by geography, by income levels, by ethnic make-up - and contrasted the economic growth over the past two decades of the merged localities with the ones that hadn't merged.
In almost every case, Rusk found the merged localities have fared better economically than the nonmerged localities they once had been equal with.
How come?
Rusk believes that when suburban counties are left to fashion their own economic strategies, they tend to focus narrowly on the types of jobs that benefit suburban residents - office parks and the like. But when suburbs are forced to look out for the city as well, the metro region seems to pursue an economic strategy that benefits all segments of society, he contends.
To put it another way, working as single entities, "you're probably not marketing yourself as a region." As a merged government, "there's a new sense of possibility, a new sense of unity that allows you to sell yourself better."
Don't like that answer? Then find another or challenge his methodology because, Rusk says, the numbers remain the same: Metro areas don't seem to grow as fast economically when they're fragmented among a lot of different governments.
Rusk would solve this by trying to bring as much of the metro area as possible under a single umbrella to create a de facto regional government that could pursue regional economic development strategies.
That's what he says has helped Albquerque - a city that covers a phenomenal 80 percent of its metro area - overcome its geographic isolation to make a solid pitch for new jobs.
"Albuquerque is geographically more isolated than any other major metro area in the country. You have to go 500 miles to Denver, 500 miles to Phoenix, 600 miles to Dallas-Forth Worth." But in the past decade, it's been able to lure major regional headquarters of J.C. Penney's, Met Life and Southwest Airlines.
Rusk would use shotgun marriages to set up his regional governments: He proposes aggressive annexation to allow cities to take in their suburbs. He would force cities and counties to consolidate. Where that's not feasible, he would require suburbs to set up housing authorities to force them to share some of the city's welfare problems. He would mandate revenue-sharing agreements between cities and suburbs to relieve cities' financial stress.
Virginia isn't likely to go that far: Every city-county consolidation proposed in Virginia since 1974 has failed; and veteran observers of Virginia's local government scene - such as Del. George Grayson, D-Williamsburg, who led a commission that tried to ease some of the friction between cities and counties - predict they'll never see another one succeed.
Roanoke City Councilman Jimmy Harvey says he wishes Virginia would do away with independent cities altogether. But he admits that's probably impossible, for the same reason that cities don't unilaterally merge with neighboring counties simply by surrendering their charters. Egos and politics are involved, plus devilish questions of law and finance. "It's kind of a complicated issue," he says.
That leaves urban policy planners in Virginia pondering this question:
If a regional approach to economic development is desirable, but Virginians can't, or won't, use annexation or consolidation to create a rough form of regional government, what else can the state do to persuade fiercely-independent localities to harness themselves together as a team?
To accomplish that, Virginia may need have to come up with some solutions that are just as unique as the state's current system.
by CNB