made to reinvigorate the local tier of government, as evidenced by the passage of "mini-gov" legislation in Indianapolis and the Dade County proposal to incorporate all unincorporated areas so that the county could provide only regional services and not serve as the first tier of government for these areas.

With centralized administration has come better financing procedures by the areawide governments. They have expanded grants-in-aid for their jurisdictions, utilized greater amounts of nonproperty taxation, and reduced past financing policies that were inequitable to central cities. However, they have not totally changed the functional emphasis of previous city administrations nor provided substantially greater amounts of redistributive services. Indeed, voters in some cases and legal restrictions in others have sometimes prevented consolidated or federated governments from expanding their functional mix of services or enlarging the territory of their urban service districts. Some examples of these constraints are the decision not to merge education in the Indianapolis consolidation and voter reluctance in Miami-Dade to allow greater county housing production of low- and moderate-income units.

Federated county and city-county consolidation reforms have not always resulted in a fully authoritative and areawide organization. Areawide and regional special districts still exist in some of these jurisdictions, as do smaller municipalities that were exempted from consolidation. Some of these new general purpose governments, moreover, have not gained full control over all Federal and State substate districts operating within their jurisdiction. Functions In An Assignment Policy

The third component of a functional assignment policy concerns the function itself. Here consideration must be given to (1) analyzing the nature of the function and its discrete components and (2) specifying the criteria most important in the performance of the function. With such analyses, a judgment can be made whether to perform the urban function on a local or areawide basis.

Assignment policies not only involve functions, but subfunctions and activities that comprise a function as well. These components of a function need not be assigned exclusively to a local or an areawide jurisdiction. Police services, land-use controls, and family assistance services provide examples of the complexity inherent in given functions. While some aspects of these functions may be provided best at the local level, others may be better performed at another level.

Some components of a function appear to be logical responsibilities of higher levels of government. Assignment of funding to larger governments, for example, may produce fiscal equity and reduce

economic externalties in the performance of a function. On the other hand, funding sometimes can and should be wholly local- especially when individual benefits from a function are readily identifiable and when the interlocal effects of service provision are minimal.

Activities common to a function that are performed at different levels also are good coordinates for reassignment to a single provider. The training activity in the police function, for example, is common to State, county, and city agencies. Yet the present structure of police training is characterized by a substantial amount of jurisdictional duplication. Assigning this activity to a single areawide or State authority would not only produce cost savings, but also result in more training standards. This aspect of the police function, then, could be separated from that of basic police protection.

Family assistance provides another illustration of the many components of a function. Within the general function, whose subfunctional components are illustrated in Figure II-1, there are a variety of program planning efforts. Yet, since the target population is the same- the family in need of assistance planning activities might be assigned to a single areawide or local government. Consolidated planning might promote better interprogram coordination and permit more sophisticated budgeting within a particular functional component. This, in turn, would permit local governments to take maximum advantage of Federal and State grant-in-aid systems and to forecast the fiscal requirements of the complete family assistance function.

While a number of activities and subfunctions might be candidates for assignment to areawide units, others might be more logically performed by lower-tier units (see Table II-15). Program execution, for example, is a logical local activity. For example, a State might set standards for waste treatment and also train waste treatment operators, but leave waste treatment operations in local hands.

A function, then, may have a variety of activities. and subfunctional components relating to its delivery. All are essential to final delivery of the service, but individual components may have greater or lesser extralocal impact, depending on the intrinsic nature of the subfunction or activity and on the way that it is administered. Figure II-2 indicates over 80 distinct steps in the community development process. All these steps, however minor, are essential, but some components, such as land acquisition and site preparation, may be of only local importance, while others are of interest to the larger community. The zoning, public works, and utility supply aspects of the community development process will concern surrounding governments whose land-use and public facility needs may be affected by these actions.

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Functions are really packages of subfunctions and activities, many of which need not be performed by the government that delivers the end service. Activities that might be centralized include financing, standard-setting, training, planning, and coordination. On the other hand, administration, budgeting, personnel section, and local supplementation of financing, standard-setting, and planning policies may still occur at the local level.

SUMMARY

There are myriad patterns of substate functional assignment, most of which are ad hoc and unsystematic in nature. Consequently, a major task in substate regionalism is the development of more comprehensive and systematic policies for assignment of functions among areawide and local governments. This task requires (a) consideration of criteria or rules for functional assignment; (b) appraisal of the procedural and structural means of allocating or reallocating functional responsibilities; and (c) an understanding of the exact nature of the functions, subfunctions, and activities which must be assigned. To understand how functions are or might be allocated in a substate regional framework, the following should be noted:

- Functions are allocated among the three basic levels of government, Federal, State, and local, as well as among different types of local government. In general, human resource services such as health and hospitals, welfare, and higher education are centralized at the county or State levels while the bulk of physical development and public safety services such as police, fire, sewerage, and parks and recreation are provided at a local level.

- Policies which have a significant impact on the allocation of functional responsibilities include intergovernmental aid channeled to preferred jurisdictions; the development of new-style Federal and State districting mechanisms that have assumed components of certain functions; and the availability of different structural and procedural means for changing or conditioning functional assignments.

- Four main guides to functional assignment emerge as pivotal considerations: fiscal equity, economic efficiency, administrative effectiveness, and political accountability. The specific components of economic efficiency include the conditions.

of economies of scale, public sector competition, and public service pricing. Fiscal equity is concerned with reduction of economic spillovers and implementation of interpersonal and interjurisdictional fiscal equalization policies. The main facets of political accountability subsume citizen access to, control of, and sometimes participation in the performance of a function. Administrative effectiveness centers on the legal authority, management capability, geographic reach, and intergovernmental cooperation a government exhibits in meeting its functional responsibilities.

- A functional assignment policy frequently hinges on the procedural and structural means of allocating functions. Procedural mechanisms include the A-95 process, the intergovernmental service contract, and transfer and consolidation of functions. All these measures have permitted voluntary and ad hoc changes in functional assignments. Structural means of changing functional assignments include Federally and State encouraged substate districts, regional councils, regional special districts, and metropolitan counties. New-style districting mechanisms usually perform activities instrumental to the delivery of a service, while traditional districts actually deliver the service itself. Both new and traditional structures have met with only limited success. New-style mechanisms often must be more closely coordinated with local government, while the legal base and functional responsibilities of regional special districts and metropolitan counties must be broadened if they are to make a more significant impact on substate functional assignments.

- Full-scale metropolitan governmental reorganizations have been the most systematic and sweeping approaches to changing substate functional assignment. They generally have resulted in centralization of both areawide and local services, raised the level and scope of a number of services, and introduced more administrative effectiveness and somewhat more fiscal equity into a function. Yet most reorganizations face the problem of structuring a lower tier of government for the delivery of local services. Also, most still must better coordinate, control, and supervise the functional operations of other regional and lower-tier units. of governments.

- Analysis of individual functions is important to a functional assignment policy. Functions are composed of numerous subfunctions and activities, all or part of which may be assigned to one or another level of government. While it is difficult to describe fully the characteristics of a local or areawide function, local services tend to focus on the individual or his immediate neigh

borhood, or to have minor impact on surrounding communities or the performance of other functions. Areawide functions have the opposite characteristics. In more general terms, areawide functions generally have a redistributive or regulatory dimension, while local ones are those where social control and program choice are more significant.

Footnotes

This chapter is a summary of Volume IV of the Substate Regionalism report, Governmental Functions and Processes: Local and Areawide.

2The six New England States and Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

3 Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Washington.

4U.S. Bureau of the Census, State Payments to Local Governments, 1967 Census of Governments, VI, No. 4 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1969), Table 6.

SACIR, Performance of Urban Functions: Local and Areawide, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 41.

"ACIR, Performance of Urban Functions, p. 47. 7ACIR, Performance of Urban Functions, p. 48. 8ACIR, Performance of Urban Functions, p. 270-271. 9ACIR, Performance of Urban Functions, p. 49.

10 The analysis here is confined to the consolidations of Nashville-Davidson, Jacksonville-Duval, and Indianapolis-Marion County and the county federated reorganization in Miami-Dade.