ABSTRACT
There have been increased calls for a regional approach to the problems confronting America’s urban areas. Regionalism entails traditional prescrip tions for metropolitan areas such as centralization and consolidation of governments and functions as well as decentralized approaches to gover nance (Savitich and Vogel 2000). The “new regionalism” advances the idea that city-county consolidation is one means of achieving regional gover nance (Lowery 2000). These neoprogressive arguments have built upon and extended the progressive reform tradition that emphasizes structural reform of local governments. These ideas have shaped the motivations and rhetoric of advocates of consolidation who have mounted city-county con solidation campaigns in dozens of communities. After little activity from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, metropolitan reformers have returned to city-county consolidation. Only twenty-five referenda occurred over the entire decade of the 1980s, but that number almost doubled in the 1990s (Blodgett 1996). In early 2003, Louisville joined the ranks of consolidated governments and in the past five years, more than a dozen communities, including large cities like Memphis, San Antonio, Buffalo, and Rochester, have publicly debated consolidation of city and county government (Brookings Institution 2002; Meyer 2002).
