ABSTRACT
Compared with traditional metropolitan reformers, new regionalists focus less on structure and more on regional problems. They call for adopting policies to counter sprawl and ameliorate its attendant problems, including traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and lack of affordable housing in the suburbs. They favor improved governance arrangements to ensure regional cooperation and coordination in metropolitan policy making but do not assume that market processes or voluntary cooperation will be sufficient to attain metropolitan governance.
Oliver Williams has posited a “lifestyle model” of metropolitan reform. According to this theory, the systems maintenance functions of government are sometimes turned over to metropolitan authorities, but in the absence of outside intervention, the lifestyle functions that control social access to upper-middle-class lifestyles are performed by local-level governments.
Metropolitan planning efforts date to the mid-1960s, when the federal government began to make planning grants available and also began to require a metropolitan plan in order for a region to be eligible for certain types of federal aid. To date, metropolitan planning has had limited effectiveness.
324Because of the availability of federal funding and because of the federal (A-95) review required for federal grants, councils of government began to spread rapidly during the 1970s. Although COGs do perform planning and review functions, they have several inherent weaknesses, especially in dealing with lifestyle issues. Because local governments are represented in a COG, those local governments can paralyze the COG by threatening to withdraw or to withhold their voluntary financial assessments.
During the 1970s, two promising innovations for metropolitan policy making emerged in Minnesota and Oregon. The Minnesota model initially stressed the separation of policy-making authority from the actual administration of service delivery; this separation was eliminated in 1994. The Oregon model combined the planning and policy-making functions of COGs with the actual administration of service delivery.
The instruments of incremental change (metropolitan planning, COGs, and A-95 review) have a number of biases. They have not addressed the lifestyle issues of metropolitan politics nearly as well as the systems maintenance issues. They also may be biased in favor of the value systems of professional administrators rather than the value systems of traditional local-government politicians.
