ABSTRACT
States have sometimes dissolved municipalities through legislation, making their citizens tum to the county for basic services and giving the county control over what assets were owned by the municipalities. On July I, 1995, for example, 186 towns in Georgia that had become virtually inactive, failing to provide much if anything in terms of service, seized to exist. The state law that mandated the abolition of these small rural units also encouraged their eventual consolidation into municipalities that would be able to stand on their own.2 Yet, while one can find examples of similar state action elsewhere, state legislatures on the whole have not been inclined to reach out and abolish municipalities,
particularly in urban areas. Indeed, when it comes to metropolitan areas, state legislators have generally thought less about abolishing existing municipal units than about creating new ones. Much of what restructuring has occurred, moreover, has been through voluntary disincorporation laws, found in some thirty states, under which citizens have voted to dissolve their municipal government. 3
Scholars have been particularly divided over how many independent local units-even considering only municipalities-there should be in each of the nation's approximately 330 metropolitan areas. In the classic civic reform tradition dating back to the early 1900s, a long line of urban scholars and observers have contended that the fragmentation of governmental authority among a large number of local jurisdictions has several ill effects. Among these are the needless duplication of services, taxing and service inequities, ruinous competition among governments, and difficulties in trying to address areawide problems.4 In regard to the last of these, reformers have argued that because what once were local problems, such as growth control, are now metropolitan problems, more authority has to be vested in units of local government with metropolitan jurisdictions.
