suming only those goods that he desires and holding governments directly responsible for the quality of the services rendered.

More specifically, there are two distinct aspects to this standard. The first is the need for citizen access and periodic control. The second is direct citizen participation in the delivery of a service.

Electoral, judicial, and other governmental processes allow citizen access and control over the workings of a governmental system. In this respect, such processes are useful in indicating to public officials the nature of services that citizens desire as well as the methods by which services are to be produced and delivered.

Patterns of political access and control differ from community to community. In some areas, there is heavy emphasis on direct access and control through referenda. In others different types of governing bodies and political party structures affect citizen

control. Electoral processes and judicial systems also determine the character and scope of access and control.

The importance of this standard is that it affects the governing process generally and also particular functions. Access and control can be especially important in functions affecting individual lifestyle or human resources such as education, housing, welfare, and health. To be performed effectively, these functions should be assigned to governments that provide easy citizen access and ready political accountability in a function.

Accountability may also require direct citizen participation in a function. Many regard citizen participation as a key factor in a constructive relationship between an individual and his government, Many also feel that it contributes to a heightened sense of community, better relationships with bureaucracies, and a better understanding of the service

delivery process. Moreover, citizen participation can give the citizen a direct hand in designating the services that he or his community most desires.

Citizen participation experiments have met with mixed success. On the positive side, participation has prompted individuals and community groups to develop new service programs or to voice grievances regarding the functioning of existing governmental systems. It also has created more public understanding of the difficulties often involved in public service delivery. On a less constructive note, however, participation has sometimes produced factionalism among different citizen groups, as well as program demands that were conflicting, ill-considered, or narrowly defined. Thus, citizen participation is a workable though delicate and cumbersome process.

The accountability criterion, then, means that there must be continuous citizen feedback as to the propriety of the functional assignment. Access, control, and participation should guarantee that the assignment of functions meets the wishes of the individual citizen and his immediate community.

Administrative Effectiveness. A final criterion for assignment is the effectiveness of functional performance. This criterion has several distinct components, including considerations of legal and geographic adequacy, management capability, and the need for general purpose government and intergovernmental flexibility in the performance of a function.

To perform a function effectively, a government must have the requisite legal authority to perform the tasks inherent in that service. Without such authority, a function cannot be expeditiously performed and other less effective means of service delivery may develop. Indeed, the lack of legal adequacy is probably a main factor in the proliferation of special purpose governments, which has hindered local flexibility in dealing with areawide service problems.

In the simplest terms, legal adequacy means that local governments should be free of fiscal, functional, structural, and personnel constraints that prevent them from effectively administering public service assignments in an innovative and expeditious manner. It is a factor to be considered in the assignment of new functions to traditional governments or to new-style units that may be only quasigovernmental in nature.

General purpose governments should also have a high priority in a functional assignment policy. A citizen is served by his governments in a variety of ways and expects them to balance competing public service demands. This balancing occurs most prominently in general purpose governmental units which have a wide variety of functional responsibilities. Granting functions to general purpose governments also promotes greater citizen interest in the workings

of government and, therefore, closer popular scrutiny of governmental policies. General purpose governments also can reconcile the divergent functional interests of their respective policies and set better service priorities.

Another traditional component of the effectiveness criterion concerns geographic adequacy. This concept, never easy to define, calls for a government to have a service area large enough to encompass the service problems that it has to deal with - river basins, commuter areas, air sheds, etc. - within which the respective public service will be performed. While this criterion is difficult to put into practice, it argues for governmental structure to be organized around the solution of real functional problems rather than the maintenance of jurisdictional prerogatives. Certainly it is a major factor underpinning the recent areawide developments explored in this report.

Another basic component of this standard is management capability. To be functionally effective, local governments should successfully identify functional problems, set service goals, design and effectively operate service delivery systems, and openly evaluate their functional performance. These processes may help a government to understand better the resource requirements for service delivery, appraise the value of alternative methods of service delivery, and determine when functional performance has been successful. With management capability governments and their constituencies will become increasingly concerned with the effectiveness of service delivery.

Finally, constructive intergovernmental relations are essential. All levels of government play some part in almost every substate function. To coordinate their functional responsibilities, different levels of government would be aided by an intergovernmental relations policy that promotes functional cooperation and ameliorates functional conflict. Different levels and types of government, after all, must be brought into play to meet areawide, community, and individual service needs without any of them being hamstrung by the jurisdictional isolationism of other units. This component guarantees that local and areawide governments, singly or jointly, will have appropriate intergovernmental procedures and mechanisms at their disposal by which to facilitate the provision of public services to their citizens.

To sum up, a standard of administrative effectiveness calls for assigning local governments a variety of functions, vesting them with legal authority to perform their assignments, establishing adequate boundaries within which to perform their services, and providing for the management capability and the intergovernmental flexibility to meet their functional assignments effectively.

Some Suggested Criteria. In specific terms, these four basic assignment criteria might be summarized in this fashion:

1. Economic Efficiency: Functions should be assigned (a) to jurisdictions large enough to realize economies of scale and small enough not to incur diseconomies of scale, (b) to jurisdictions willing to provide alternative service offerings to their citizens and to provide these public services within a price range and level of effectiveness acceptable to local citizenry, and (c) to jurisdictions that adopt pricing policies for appropriate functions whenever possible.

2. Equity: Functions should be assigned (a) to jurisdictions large enough to encompass the cost and benefits of a function or willing to compensate other jurisdictions for the service costs imposed or benefits received by them, and (b) to jurisdictions that have adequate fiscal capacity to finance their public service responsibilities and that are willing to implement measures that insure interpersonal and interjurisdictional equity in the performance of a function.

3. Political Accountability: Functions should be assigned (a) to jurisdictions controllable by, accessible to, and accountable to their residents in the performance of their public service responsibilities, and (b) to jurisdictions that maximize the conditions and opportunities for active and productive citizen participation in the performance of a function.

4. Administrative Effectiveness: Functions should be assigned (a) to jurisdictions that are responsible for a wide variety of functions and so can balance competing functional interests, (b) to jurisdictions that encompass a geographic area adequate for effective performance of a function, (c) to jurisdictions that explicitly determine the goals and means of discharging public service responsibilities and that periodically reassess program goals in light of performance standards, (d) to jurisdictions willing to pursue intergovernmental means of promoting interlocal functional cooperation and reducing interlocal functional conflict, and (e) to jurisdictions with adequate legal authority to perform a function and to rely on this authority in administering the function.

Theories and Procedures

Assigned functions are performed by various types and levels of substate institutions. Effective use of the foregoing criteria requires an understanding of

the different systems and functional capabilities of substate mechanisms and governments.

Chapter II of Volume IV of this report describes three distinct approaches to schemes for substate assignment of functions. One school favors a decentralized and ad hoc or polycentric approach to functional assignment; another argues for federation with a clear-cut division of responsibilities between areawide and local units of government; a third would vest all functional assignments within one consoli-. dated metropolitan government. All three approaches have their theoretical bases and have been models for functional assignment in many metropolitan

areas.

Polycentricity. Polycentrists favor an ad hoc, bargained approach to assigning urban services. They agree that any areawide tier of government should have few preordained or formally defined functional responsibilities, allowing most functions to be performed by lower-tier governments directly or by contract with other, larger units of government. In this manner, citizens will receive only those services they desire from lower- and upper-tier governments, including special districts.

Accordingly, polycentrists generally favor a fragmented metropolitan governance set-up with largescale, upper-tier governments performing only those services that are bid for by local governments and with lower-tier governments providing all other serv-. ices. When regulation of local government is desired, bargaining among affected local governments or intervention by State government or the courts is relied on. The polycentric approach is basically a market model for allocating functions to different levels of government. Functions - local and areawide - are provided only by the governments that citizens choose to perform them.

Most metropolitan areas exhibit a polycentric form of metropolitan functional allocation. Governments frequently perform services at the behest of other units or directly perform those services required of them by their constituents. Functional cooperation between service providers and contractors is common in most metropolitan areas and special purpose districts which provide individual services to particular areas abound.

Yet, there are constraints in polycentric functional assignment. Citizens can not always freely move to communities where they would like to live. Cooperation tends to occur most frequently among homogenous jurisdictions and only in selected, noncontroversial functions. Moreover, special district accountability is not always direct or apparent. Thus, polycentrism does little to ease interlocal functional conflict; indeed it permits it to become institutionalized and puts pressure on external agents- the State and Federal government -to resolve such con

flict. And it does not always heighten citizen choice or provide accountability.

Federation. A number of observers argue for a formal, two-tier system of functional assignment. They favor the creation of a general purpose areawide government which performs functions solely for and in conjunction with lower-tier governments. Federationists contend that unsystematic assignment of functional responsibilities will frequently produce too little centralization of area wide functions, sometimes overcentralization of local ones, and too little coordination of both. They approve of the establishment of an area wide government that determines priorities among regional functions, mediates interlocal functional conflict, and coordinates local decision making.

Limited experience with two-tier government in Miami-Dade County and Minneapolis-St. Paul shows that areawide governments have assumed a number of areawide functions and raised and standardized the scope of other public services. However, areawide governments have not always mediated interlocal functional conflict. Indeed, their reluctance to mediate conflict has led overlying governments, particularly States, to assume directly or rely on other regional bodies for the performance of areawide functions. Also, two-tier arrangements do not always result in the establishment of a general purpose areawide unit but sometimes one which has

merely budgetary and regulatory controls over other areawide bodies.

Consolidation. Another theory of functional assignment states that all substate functions are best performed by a single unit of government. Unified government, proponents argue, will produce economy, greater service integration and coordination, better public control over service delivery, more efficient administration, and more equitable financing of public services. Consolidationists contend that governmental fragmentation is at the heart of metropolitan service problems since local governments will not always cooperate and since fragmentation creates excessive variations in local capabilities to meet complex service problems.

Where governmental consolidation has occurred, the quantity and quality of some public services has improved and services have been expanded into fringe areas. Elimination of service duplication and somewhat greater fiscal equity in financing also has occurred. On the other hand, consolidations are still beset with vexing political problems. Political representation remains a source of conflict, pressures for service decentralization persist, and minority groups -on the fringe and at the center-feel that their political and functional interests have suffered.

While all these general assignment models offer a systematic guide to designing functional assignment systems, most frequently assignment decisions

A-95 Clearinghouses

1972

Identified

Provided

Provided Orderly

are not made on this basis. Instead, less drastic procedural and structural adaptations are adopted. Three general types of substate procedures affect the assignment of a function: intergovernmental service agreements, transfer and consolidation of functions, and the A-95 process.

The A-95 Process. This procedure has made a distinct impact on substate functional assignment. It has expanded the level of interlocal information about local government activities and made State and Federal governments more aware of the impact of their grant-in-aid policies. Indeed, A-95 clearinghouses now serve as important regional devices for disseminating grant information to a wide variety of State, regional, and local bodies (see Table II-11). These referral activities in turn have made a modest impact on grant application activity: 30 to 50 percent of surveyed local government officials indicated that A-95 activities had resulted in identification of functional conflicts, weaknesses, or new opportunities in project grant applications (see Table II-12). In short, the process has raised the level of information in the grant-in-aid process and permitted, to some degree, better project priorities by grantor governments. At the same time, the advisory nature of the process and the lack of effective comprehensive planning by Federal, State, and local governments have limited the functional impact of the A-95 process.

Intergovernmental Service Agreements. Data from Chapter III of this volume attest to the importance

of the intergovernmental service agreement. Survey data indicate that 61 percent or 1,343 local governments were involved in service agreements, an average of 8.6 agreements per participating local government. Physical development services and auxiliary support activities in data and personnel matters were the areas of most frequent cooperation, although cooperation was more apt to occur in areawide rather than local functions.

Intergovernmental service agreements are made with a variety of providers. Areawide and local services are more apt to be provided by municipal governments and private firms, and "shared" functions by counties and municipalities. Support activities, particularly those of a personnel nature, are most often provided by State governments. The largescale public and private producers, including special districts and councils of government which are involved in intergovernmental service agreements, afford a means of changing functional assignments without modifying local governmental structure (see Table II-13).

Intergovernmental service agreements generate some problems in the allocation of functions. Since different service providers are often involved in an interrelated function, coordination problems can result. Thus, hospital services are frequently the responsibility of a private producer while mental health services are usually the responsibility of State and local agencies. In similar fashion, water supply often is provided by a special district while water