tricting endeavors. Moreover, these agencies should develop operational definitions of general purpose local government, including viability criteria, and ensure that they are used in administering Federal assistance programs, including revenue sharing.

On the other side of the coin, opponents charge that conditions attached to Federal categorical grants requiring or encouraging local reorganization represent an unwarranted intrusion into city and county as well as State affairs, and run counter to recent trends toward decentralization of greater decision making responsibility to the State and local levels. After all, they contend, there is no proof that smaller localities are non-viable or even inefficient. Indeed, the opposite may well be the case, since these local units are closer to the sources of problems and more accountable to the public for the effectiveness of remedial actions. A population cutoff or requirements and incentives favoring consortia of local applicants, then, are arbitrary provisions reflecting more of a reformer's penchant for jurisdictional neatness and order than the results of a systematic analysis of the requisites for efficient and effective grant administration.

Particularly with regard to revenue sharing, it is asserted, smaller local units are just as deserving of their share of available funds as larger jurisdictions - after all, residents of both pay taxes and have public service demands that need to be met. Moreover, such provisions are a clear contradiction of the "no strings" thrust of revenue sharing.

LINGERING QUESTIONS

This chapter has attempted to put in analytical perspective the wide range of critical problems and issues involved in substate regional developments, and to examine the pros and cons of various strategies that have been employed traditionally to achieve areawide governance. Basic questions have been raised concerning the present status and future directions of local governmental reorganization in the substate regional framework, including:

Are recent Federal and State substate regional districting policies and programs. a help or a hinderance to local and areawide reform?

Are restructured regional councils a reform goal in and of themselves or a half

INTRODUCTION

This volume of the Commission's study of Substate Regionalism and the Federal System has focused on the more traditional means of promoting interlocal cooperation and of achieving local as well as areawide governmental reorganization. In this second phase of the study, we have moved beyond the districting issues and recommendations detailed in Volume I and confronted the long range, more elemental questions subsumed under the general heading of modernizing local government.

In the Commission's view, no analysis of the complexities and challenge of recent substate regional developments would be complete without full consideration of this basic issue. Federally supported districts, State established substate districts, special districts and public authorities, regional councils and coordinative areawide procedures and devices are, after all, a sad commentary on the fact that the present jurisdictional and functional assignment pattern at the substate level, in all but a few cases, is markedly dysfunctional and increasingly undemocratic.

Efficiency, equity, and political accountability are basic goals that are difficult to approximate in any free governmental system, given the tension and conflict between and among them. But, at the substate regional level, again with some notable exceptions, no formal arena or familiar political process exists to even grapple with these issues and the countless specific policy questions-all of an areawide nature - that relate to them. This pushes many of these issues and policies to the Federal and State levels and prompts these levels to sustain or mandate a variety of substate regional bodies and mechanisms. Legitimate and directly accountable authority, then, is the missing piece in the metropolitan and non-metropolitan regional mosaics. Moreover, the jurisdictional fragmentation and structural and fiscal weakness of many governmental units at the local level have compounded the problem of coping with servicing challenges.

This in no way denigrates the constructive role that can be assumed by the umbrella multi-jurisdictional organizations (UMJO's) which emerge from the recommendations advanced in Volume I of this series.

As we view them, there is full compatibility between our UMJO proposals and the agenda for general local governmental reform set forth in this chapter. An overall effort in both areas must be mounted to bring the structure, functions, and personnel units below the State level to a point where they can cope with the electorate's current and future servicing needs and in a more efficient, effective, and accountable fashion than now generally prevails.

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In some large substate regions, the UMJO would be the only politically feasible regional alternative— either now or in the future- yet, local government modernization would still be possible and needed to facilitate many of the UMJO's difficult assignments. In other, smaller, less complicated areas, the UMJO might be only a short range response to the immediate problems of mushrooming districts, and here areawide governmental reorganization efforts might be strengthened by the umbrella organization - to the point that some form of regional government eventually would supersede it. In a handful of substate regions, a regional government already is in place and no UMJO would be necessary. Quite clearly, the differences among all these regions as to size, jurisdictionai complexity, political attitudes, and servicing problems preclude any across-the-board generalizations about the specific relationship between our UMJO and general local governmental modernization proposals.

But despite this diversity, four facts stand out:

- All substate regions require an authoritative, areawide decisionmaker, whether an UMJO or a government;

- All but a handful of these areas require a strengthening of their local units;

- Certainly a majority of them face major hurdles in achieving areawide governmental reform in the near future; and

- All of the interstate metropolitan areas confront insurmountable regional reorganization hurdles, save perhaps for the UMJO option.

These are the factors that explain the linkages between the UMJO and local governmental modernization components of our substate regional strategy. The third element in this strategy is provided by the pair of recommendations in Volume IV of this series, relating to the need for more systematic functional assignment processes.

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

The following constitutes a summary of this volume's findings relating to the assignment of substate functions, county reform, other local government restructuring efforts, and the pattern of government in non-metropolitan areas. These findings, in turn, provide a background for the reorganization recommendations that complete this volume and this second phase of our report on Substate Regionalism and the Federal System.

Assignment of Functions: Local and Areawide3

Two distinct levels of functional assignment affect substate regions nationally: one between Federal, State, and local governments, and the

other among different kinds of local government. The Federal government tends to be the foremost direct provider of natural resource development and air and water transportation services. State governments are the major providers of higher education, highways, welfare, and correctional services. At the interlocal level, counties provide the bulk of welfare, health, and hospital functions while municipal governments remain the major providers of primary and secondary education, police, fire protection, sewerage, parks and recreation, and water supply functions.

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• Intergovernmental service agreements among the most popular means of changing substate functional assignments. As of 1972, 42 States had general interlocal cooperation statutes, with 32 permitting cooperation across State lines and one authorizing agreements with Canadian subnational governments. The two chief impediments to the fullest use of these statutes are (1) both of the governments involved in 31 States must possess the power separately in order to exercise it jointly, and (2) the general law in 13 States does not supersede a separately enacted contracting statute in a specific functional area.

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Intergovernmental service agreements among the most popular meks of changing substate functional assignments. As of 1972, 42 States had general interlocal cooperation statutes, with 32 permitting cooperation across State lines and one authorizing agreements with Canadian subnational governments. The two chief impediments to the fullest use of these statutes are (1) both of the governments involved in 31 States must possess the power separately in order to exercise it jointly, and (2) the general law in 13 States does not supersede a separately enacted contracting statute in a specific functional area.

The most popular functions and activities covered by service agreements include technical components of the police function (such as training, crime laboratories, and communication), planning, engineering services, sewage and solid waste disposal, water supply, jails, libraries, street lighting, refuse collection, and animal control. Functions or activities that are rarely the subject of intergovernmental service agreements include record maintenance, zoning, urban renewal, basic police services, and building inspection.

Transfers and consolidations of functions are less used means of changing substate functional assignments. Only 8 percent of all intergovernmental servicing agreements covered in the 1972 ACIR/ICMA survey involved the shared or consolidated provision of a service. The ACIR/ ICMA/NACO survey of county government (1971, 1972) indicated that service transfers and consolidations were most prevalent in the functions of libraries, planning, health, and corrections, and were least practiced in the areas of power supply, natural resources, transportation and housing.

Service agreements are considered distinct from functional transfers, with a transfer being more permanent and constituting a major shift in fiscal responsibility and policy control. This distinction, however, is often blurred. Of the ten States allowing general functional transfers, five provide for revocation, five require voter approval, and three require payment to the government assuming the function.

Of the 2,316 incorporated municipalities responding to the ACIR-ICMA survey, 63 percent enter into servicing agreements with other governments. The larger the government, the greater its tendency to enter into agreements. Council-manager cities were more prone to servicing cooperation than other municipal types, and central and suburban cities entered into more agreements than non-metropolitan units. The dominant motive behind these efforts was to benefit from economies of scale, and the main inhibiting factor was the fear that local independence would be limited.

Recently established substate agencies and procedures have added a new functional dimension to the substate performance of functions. State substate districts and regional councils have performed useful auxiliary tasks. They have raised the level of comprehensive planning in substate regions, provided a forum for interlocal communication on pressing functional matters, and better identified the goals and objectives of various regional functions. They occasionally have encouraged establishment of new areawide servicing organizations and sometimes have directly provided controversial substate functions.

Federally encouraged substate districts have played several distinct roles in the performance of functions. All such agencies prepare com