Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506070010
SECTION: EDITORIALS PAGE: D-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The report also implies, however, a background of issues that go beyond technical details of how the valley's local governments might via cooperation improve their efficiency.
The $30,000 study by Towers Perrin Consultants of Arlington, financed by valley businessmen and (with varying levels of enthusiasm) five valley governments, was a result of prodding by state House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell of Vinton, who missed the report's unveiling. A good chunk of it is given to the useful service of listing areas in which local governments already cooperate - a fairly long list often neglected amid attention to petty squabbles and rivalries.
Realistically alert to the fact that actual merger of independent governments is not on the table, the consultants make suggestions for informal collaboration and formal unification, either on a contractual or a joint-operation basis, of certain services.
They also call for the creation of a Roanoke Valley Council of Governments as a permanent body to build on the success of cooperative ventures that have emerged in recent years.
All of which is fine. Models for further collaboration are available. The call to search more intensively for greater cooperation is well worth heeding. And a council of governments is a good idea, which should be pushed.
There is, though, more to the story. In looking for ways to use cooperative arrangements to improve local-government services in the valley, the consultants not only noted dollars-and-cents considerations. They also cited what might be called cultural constraints - a desire for local control, history, fear of favoritism toward another party, etc. - on cooperative ventures.
Hence, merging fire- and police-dispatch services is recommended not only because it would save money but also because, as a communications-only function, their merger would not rearrange existing controls in a way that, say, merger of police or fire departments themselves would.
Hence, too, the difficulty in pursuing the consultants' suggestion that the town of Vinton might want to dissolve its government and let Roanoke County, of which the town is part, provide the same services - even though the dissolution almost certainly would lower Vintonites' taxes. So far, anyway, cultural constraints have prevailed in Vinton over pocketbook considerations.
That isn't silly on its face. Maintaining a sense of community at the human-scale neighborhood level is worth something. The question is whether it is necessary to be organized into a government to maintain a sense of community. From the evidence of the many Vinton-sized neighborhoods just in the Roanoke Valley without their own formal government, the answer is no.
Nor are neighborhood-level communities, though they make good building blocks, the only communities. What the latest study does not note, in its focus on government services, is that "regionalism" involves a sense of larger community. It involves an understanding of the modern world's economic and social reality: that what happens in Vinton affects life in Salem; that how inner-city Roanoke is faring has a connection to how Cave Spring is doing; that the real competition isn't within our region, but with other regions. Indeed, that the New River Valley is part of this same region, even if opportunities for shared government services are fewer.
The extent to which local governments cooperate to provide services more cost-effectively is one sign of regionalism's health. But if regionalism is regarded as only a matter of more efficient government, if it is not understood as anything more than the development of business arrangements among separate jurisdictions, then the region's prospects are dimmer than they otherwise could be.
by CNB