Metro government is when cities and counties consolidate to form one larger unit. The idea faces fierce opposition, but its proponents brought in a speaker yesterday to explain the benefits of metro government.
About 200 people showed up to hear featured speaker Jerry Abramson, the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, talk about his city’s experience enacting metro government in 2000.
Louisville went from being a city of 260,000 to 700,000, which boosts them among the 20 largest cities in America.
Abramson says the elimination of competing city and county governments and policies has benefited the region.
“We had some projects that were pending,” he said. “And sometimes one government was for them, and sometimes one government was against them.
“And generally speaking, whoever was proposing the project would throw their hands up in the air and say, ‘Enough! This community simply doesn’t have its act together.’ And they would walk away from us.”
Abramson says his metro government is a success story, partly because it’s left most of the municipalities alone. The more than 80 suburbs of Louisville in Jefferson County have maintained their autonomy, he says: they pay the same taxes as before and have the same police and fire districts.
But now, Abramson says they have more representation than before through the metro council that was created.
“To get people to understand that now they were going to have a metro council who would sit on the metro council and for the first time would speak on their behalf, ‘they’ being about 25,000 people represented by each one of the council members,” he said.
After Abramson’s speech, a panel of all three Kanawha County Commissioners, Charleston City Councilman Marc Weintraub, Jack Rossi of the Charleston Area Alliance and state Sen. Brooks McCabe answered questions from the audience.
Though no one seemed to be sure how closely Charleston would try to follow Louisville’s model of metro government, the panelists all stressed widespread county representation through the metro council. This, they say, will allow citizens in all areas of the county to have their voices heard.
Metro government would also benefit Charleston, all the panelists agreed, by bolstering its population, at least on paper, and drawing more jobs to the area.
The two-hour presentation and question-and-answer session didn’t convince everyone. Thornton Cooper is a lawyer from South Charleston. He disagrees with a law passed by the legislature this year allowing metro government to be approved by a simple majority, but only in Kanawha County. He says this is unconstitutional.
“I also think it’s a bad idea because we are nothing like Jefferson County,” he said. “Kanawha County is much more rural. It’s comparing apples with oranges. So it’s a bad idea and I think it’s unconstitutional.
“They should have had at least one or two people up there who are opposed to metro government; then we could have had a fair discussion instead of everyone basically patting each other on the back.”
Evelyn Harris of Charleston taught political science at the University of Charleston for years. She says looking at it though a historical lens, metro government would have solved many of our country’s political problems.
“I have been teaching political science for longer than you have been alive and from the very beginning one of the major problems was always the fragmentation of local government that made it so difficult to have people being represented and for policies to be enacted and for policy to be carried out,” she said. “Big problem in our country for years.”
Sergeant John Jarman of the Clendenin Police Department says metro government might be fine in theory, but it seems that the plans are too vague.
“Because the people who are setting it up don’t have a plan to set it up,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. There’s too many contradictions. Well, for example, we’re going to save money without eliminating budget or eliminating personnel. How do you save money?”
Jarman’s boss, Clendenin Chief of Police David Brinckman agreed that details need to be worked out. But he said it was a visit to Louisville that convinced him of metro government’s merits.
“You know what convinced me to be for metro government?” he asked. “I went on one of their trips to Louisville, and I spoke to a gentleman on their council out there. And this guy told me that he did not vote for metro government in 2000 when it passed. He was not for it, he didn’t want anything to do with it. Now he’s a councilman.
“So I simply asked a simple question: ‘If you had the opportunity, would you go back to how it was in 1999, would you do it?’ He said ‘never.’ And that was enough for me.”
Sen. Brooks McCabe says he would like to put metro government to a vote before the end of the year, but he says it’s more likely to happen next spring.