What Would A Local Combined City/County Mahaska Government Look Like

Mahaska-County-Courthouse

Oskaloosa, Iowa – During Tuesday’s Supervisors meeting, Chairman Greg Gordy read an excerpt from an email between Oskaloosa City Manager Michael Schrock Jr. and County Supervisor Ken Rozenboom stating the two parties are interested in seeing what had been spoke about on the subject of government consolidation in the past, and to help further discussions if that were to continue in the future.

“On the matter of unified government, I would like to know what discussions were held before and what the conclusions were. It always made sense to me that a county like Mahaska should have a unified government system. I would like to pursue this,” is a portion of the email Rozenboom sent to Schrock in October of 2011.
This discussion of unified government had been brought up in email form during the talks over issues along Carbonado Road, when Supervisor Greg Gordy and Oskaloosa City Manager Mike Schrock were discussing the issues over water and sewage problems in the area. In that email conversation, Schrock wrote, “Hey, if you can convince them to annex or to not need city services, we could drop that whole double rate issue for them. Now that would be good city/county cooperation.”

I posed the question to Rozenboom on Wednesday what he envisions the combined government would be like. “I’ve had this question all my lifetime. Does it make more sense for a county of 23 thousand and a city of 11 thousand to do some things jointly as opposed to each having totally separate governments? That’s a whole lot bigger question than water for instance.” said Rozenboom.

“You’re talking about a major overhaul of a lot of stuff,” Rozenboom said on the idea. He went on to say that “all we have at this point is that comment that I made.” Rozenboom did say he’s heard references of this being brought up before in the past.

“Some people look for solutions and some people look for problems. If all we want to do is see the problems, we’ll never find a solution,” Rozenboom said in regards to the difficulties that would be faced in a consolidation effort.

Solutions to help save costs for the taxpayer could be sharing engineering services and personnel, law enforcement, and road crews, but even those would take great care to implement and have not been officially brought to the table for discussion.

Consolidation and regionalization of government entities is not a new concept, and many times it’s a suggested course of action as a cost saving measure. “Over the last 15 years, cost saving through economies of scale, reduced duplication of efforts, and increased technical capacity in service provision for city-county consolidation has not been supported by empirical research,” said a report from the Iowa Policy Research Organization (IPRO) The State University of Iowa. The report states that more savings are found in county to county resource sharing versus city to county sharing. The reason for this being the different services the two entities perform.

In a report by Iowa State University professor Alfred Ho, he concluded that “tax savings is not a significant justification for consolidation, especially if it will involve large political and re-organizational costs.”

One other matter is of personnel. Many times during consolidations, the personnel from the entity that were paid less will be increased in pay to match their co-workers rate of pay. Morale issues and policy issues covering employees are also factors when combining the government entities.

“Nevertheless, city-county consolidation can improve economic development and spur economic growth,” the report from IPRO stated.