distribution may involve a private contractor. Similar situations occur in refuse collection and solid waste disposal and in particular subcomponents of the police and fire functions.

Another problem is the lack of cooperation in certain urban jurisdictions. Localities below 25,000 population, for example, many of which are in metropolitan areas, tend not to enter into service agreements, particularly in areawide services. These jurisdictions may not have sufficient personnel or support services to monitor agreements even though they could benefit by them. In a similar fashion, many central cities do not enter into service agreements, possibly because of their unwillingness to serve suburban communities or because of suburban reluctance to cooperate with cities on other issues. In either case, many central cities which could be major service providers are not fully engaged in the cooperation process.

Transfer and Consolidation of Functions. Transfers and consolidations of functions are another way of changing functional assignments. However, they are generally less widely practiced than intergovernmental service agreements. Data from Chapter II of Volume IV indicate that they generally comprise only about 10 percent of the total of the 11,585 intergovernmental service agreements identified in the ACIR-ICMA survey.

Data derived from the ACIR-ICMA-NACO survey of county government indicates that while functional transfers and consolidations are not frequently used, both enjoy equal popularity when employed. Occasional misuse of the transfer and consolidation procedure is suggested by the data, i.e., sometimes essentially local functions are centralized, areawide ones are decentralized or operated on a shared basis, and "shared" functions with an areawide and local dimension are transferred completely upwards to county government (see Table II-14).

To sum up, these three types of procedural adaptations have changed functional assignments on a voluntary basis, but they have not involved all functions or all jurisdictions.

Structural Approach

As Volumes I and III of this report note, the key structural means of changing functional assignments include Federally and State-encouraged substate districts, councils of government, regional special districts, the metropolitan county, and city-county consolidation or federation.

Substate Districts and Regional Councils. These regional planning bodies are generally responsible for areawide comprehensive planning though the functional components of such planning may differ among States and regions. As communication agents,

they increase the level of awareness among localities of substate functional matters. They also provide substantial technical assistance to local governments in developing programs to implement regional policies. Other responsibilities include establishment of nonprofit institutions to deliver regional services, mobilizing funds for regional services through the Federal grant-in-aid process, and, in some cases and where the law allows, directly providing substate services.

Substate districts and regional councils are relatively new actors on the local scene; most have been created since 1965 to satisfy State or local desire to participate in, to better control, and to meet the legal requirements of certain Federal substate programs. Once created, these bodies have served a useful, if sometimes limited, purpose in substate regional administration. They have increased the quantity and quality of technical resources in substate areas, provided a forum for local governments to influence State policy and meet certain State/

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regional purposes as well, raised grant monies for regional programs, and improved the quality and scope of the information base on which local governments make policy decisions.

More recently, these bodies have been proposed for other, more authoritative purposes: mediating interlocal conflict, supervising subordinate regional agencies, and even performing regional services when no other entities are available. Thus, while these bodies are now basically auxiliary actors in the assignment of urban functions, they may become more important in the future.

Federal Substate Districts. These districts play a distinct role in substate functional matters through their funding, planning, and, in some cases, implementation and service delivery activities.

Federal substate districts generally engage in several types of funding activities, namely receipt and disbursement of Federal aid, mobilization of fiscal resources, and setting priorities for Federal aid. In fiscal year 1972 the 14 main Federal substate

programs received $221 million in planning funds and had some direct or indirect influence over the disbursement of over $8.4 billion in related Federal construction and operating project grants. Community action agencies (CAA's) and economic development districts (EDD's) have been successful in mobilizing other fiscal resources in their respective functional areas: In 1972-73, 84 percent of EDD budgets were derived from non-EDD sources while from 1965-72 591 CAA's mobilized over $1.3 billion in fiscal resources from non-Federal sources for antipoverty efforts.

Federal districts have not made much progress in setting funding priorities to guide Federal areawide programs slated for their regions for numerous reasons: rising Federal agency concern with their own program priorities, district unwillingness or inability to ration funds for projects within a district, and lack of greater Federal funding for district planning efforts. They also have an uneven record in functional planning, which is impeded by its narrow gauge, its lack of relationship to implementation, poorly managed or ill-considered citizen participation, contradictory or vague legal requirements, and planning conflicts among various types of Federal and State encouraged districts. At the same time, some of these districts, notably comprehensive health planning agencies (CHP's), and economic development districts (EDD's), have made progress in coordinating the various functional activities of established local governments.

Some Federal substate districts directly condition the performance of a function or deliver services themselves. Thus, in 10 States CHP's play a central role in certifying need for hospital construction or renovation. Local development districts (LDD's) deliver economic development services throughout Appalachia, and CAA's directly deliver anti-poverty services in some poorer communities. More importantly, however, some Federal districts, notably CAA's and EDD's, have insistently pressured local governments to adopt new services for their constituents. Generally, Federal substate districts have been helpful in suggesting new, more coordinated services for established areawide and local governments to deliver.

Regional Special Districts. These mechanisms exist in almost every region in the country, with more than 1,000 countywide or multicounty special districts in metropolitan areas alone as of 1972. As Table II-5 notes, regional special districts frequently account for a major share of metropolitan expenditures in their particular functions and are most prominent in the public health and hospital, sewage, and utility functions.

Special districts continue to be favored for eco

nomic and some political reasons and opposed for other political ones. In economic terms, they take advantage of economies of scale, attract better trained personnel, and adopt more advanced management practices than smaller units of government. In political terms, they can isolate a sensitive program, provide the means of appearing to keep local budgets down, and avoid the issue of regional government while performing a regional function.

Nevertheless, the isolation of most of these mechanisms from general purpose governments has sometimes limited their effectiveness. They forfeit centralized purchasing, budgeting, and personnel management services offered by larger general purpose units. They do not always account for or understand their impact on related services. They tend to pay higher capital costs, fail to coordinate their work with general local governments, and are frequently inaccessible and unaccountable to the metropolitan political process.

The desire to retain the operational advantages of regional districts yet constrain their political and administrative defects has led some States to treat their operations more stringently. Recent studies in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan have called for the abolition of these bodies or their continuance as State administrative arms. Other States have set up boundary commissions, strengthened regional councils, or multifunctional service districts to oversee the formation of or to regulate the operations of special districts within their jurisdiction.

Regional special districts apparently will continue to be utilized for the performance of areawide functions because of the economic advantages ascribed to their operations. However, their administrative and political deficiencies are leading to different patterns of political control.

The Metropolitan County. The metropolitan county is another traditional structural alternative for changing functional assignments. Here the emphasis has been on creating an area wide general purpose government that can perform selected regional and urban functions.

The functional performance of the metropolitan county, as detailed in Chapter IV, has been of rather mixed quality. The bulk of metropolitan counties still concentrate on performing traditionally Stateassigned functions, though reorganized counties tend to provide more urban and regional services (see Table II-15).

County emphasis on traditional functions stems from a variety of reasons. Among them are the lack of county functional home rule provisions in most States; the counties may be legally prohibited from assuming new urban or regional services. Counties also frequently cannot use nonproperty tax sources, essential to broadening their fiscal capacity.

Municipal-county functional conflict also prevents counties from assuming more functional responsibilities in metropolitan areas. Some State municipal home rule statutes (such as Ohio's) give exclusive jurisdiction to municipal governments in selected functions. In other cases, municipalities encourage the county to confine its services to unincorporated areas where it acts as the first tier of government. In still other cases, counties perform considerable municipal service contracting rather than assuming a function on a countywide basis, although transfers to counties sometimes occur, as Table II-14 notes.

If counties are sometimes unable or unwilling to perform more urban and regional functions, they also usually do not act as an authoritative voice vis-avis other regional units. As Chapter IV indicates, they frequently do not or cannot exercise strong controls over constituent special districts. Even in the 20 States that give counties the legal authority to create subordinate service districts special districts still abound. Moreover, few counties are empowered or desire to supervise the functional performance of lower levels of government. Only one - Miami-Dade -can set performance standards for municipal functions; other counties that have proposed such charter amendments have seen them defeated at the polls.

In short, counties have been unwilling or unable to act as dominant urban-regional service providers or to supervise performance of local functions, though strong urban counties in a few selected StatesCalifornia, Florida, Maryland, New York, and Virginia - have assumed a number of urban and regional functions.

City-County Consolidations and Federations. 10 Chapters III of Volume IV and V of this volume assess the functional experience with full-scale American metropolitan governmental reorganization. As with partial functional reallocation policies, the record is mixed. In general, reorganizations have tended to improve the quality and raise the level of some public services, contribute to some measure of fiscal equity, and provide for greater administrative coordination of services. However, political access to the governmental systems has not always been improved, nor have the service needs of distinct minorities always been satisfied. Moreover, most consolidations continue to face the problem of developing a lower tier of administration for the delivery of certain services.

In all three recent major consolidations and in the single federated county case, a number of previously localized functions have been centralized. In the consolidations, almost all functions are centralized and only a few, like refuse collection and street cleaning, are decentralized through the operations of urban services districts, as in Nashville and Jacksonville, At the same time, proposals have been