The assignment of governmental responsibility for urban functions is presently an unsystematic if not haphazard process. These patterns of functional assignment have resulted from national program initiatives; State decisions about whether to perform a service directly, indirectly by mandating it to a lower governmental tier, or through the workings of its intergovernmental aid system; fiscal pressures on State and local governments to assume or transfer services; and the historical and legal status of different types of local governments within a particular State. Since these factors have had different impacts in different States, the American Federal system is composed of 50 patterns of State-local functional assignment and at least as many systems of interlocal allocation of service responsibility.

PRESENT PATTERNS OF ASSIGNMENT:

AN OVERVIEW

There are two distinct dimensions of functional assignment in the federal system: a division of responsibility among national, State, and local levels of government; and assignment among different kinds of local governments - counties, municipalities, townships, special districts, and school districts.

With respect to levels of government, the national government is the foremost direct provider of natural resource development and air and water transportation services. State governments are the major providers of higher education, highway, welfare, and correctional services. Local governments remain the dominant actors in providing education, police, fire, sewerage, refuse collection, parks and recreation, and library services. The hospital function is evenly shared between State and local levels of government.

However, these data do not adequately reflect the true assignment of functions since they do not take into account the impact of intergovernmental aid on these functions. When this factor is considered, the Federal government replaces the States as the major financier of welfare services and supplants local governments as the chief source of funds for housing and urban renewal, while State government becomes a more prominent financier of educational services.

At the local level, the functional assignment pattern is even more complex. As Table II-3 notes, counties are the predominant local providers of welfare, natural resources, and correctional services; school districts predominate in the education function; special districts are most significant in the water transport function. Municipalities and townships play the major role in providing basic police, fire, sewerage, refuse collection, parks and recreation, housing and renewal, parking, libraries, water supply, and electric power services. The health, hospitals, and general public buildings function is roughly apportioned evenly between counties and

municipalities, while the mass transit function is generally divided between municipalities and citywide or regional special districts.

These generalizations from national data do not reflect regional variations. In general terms, counties are unimportant in the New England States, in contrast to their major roles in California, Maryland, North Carolina, New York, Nevada, and Virginia. Similarly, townships have major functional responsibilities in 11 strong township States, 2 have only minor ones in another 10,3 and are non-existent in another 29 States. Special districts assume major functional responsibilities in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, and Washington, but are of only minor import in Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia.

Given these variations, however, a general pattern of functional assignment still can be noted. As Table II-4 suggests, there are several distinct patterns of service assignment in the Nation's State-local systems of government. The State, as already noted, generally takes direct functional responsibility for highways, natural resources, and corrections. Public welfare, hospitals, and health exhibit a State or State-county division of functional responsibility. At the local level the responsibility for general control and general public buildings is usually shared between county and municipal governments, with the county being the more dominant service provider. Airports and libraries are similarly divided, with municipal governments being the major service providers. Funding for the water transport function is shared between municipalities and regional special districts. Education, housing and urban renewal, police, fire, sewage, refuse collection, parks and recreation, parking, and water supply are predominantly performed by municipal governments.

Intergovernmental aid programs also play a major part in fixing patterns of assignment within States. Thus, 19 States channel all their welfare aid solely to county governments as do seven States in the hospital function, 12 States in the health function, and five States in the highways function.4 Other patterns of exclusive State aid policy also occur. New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Rhode Island disburse all their highway aid to municipalities or townships. State welfare aid is disbursed solely to townships in Vermont; hospital aid goes solely to special districts in Georgia, and exclusively to municipalities in Nebraska and West Virginia. State health aid is confined to municipalities in Kansas and New Hampshire.

The following generalizations emerge from this overview of the broad functional assignment pattern: ... Federal, State and different types of local governments have both direct and indirect roles in the assignment of func

tions. Indeed, natural resources, public welfare, correctional, health and hospital, and highway services in a large number of cases are provided directly by State and Federal governments.

.. Municipal governments are the dominant service providers in a variety of physical services, namely police, fire protection, sewerage, parks and recreation, and water supply. Larger local governments such as counties tend to be more predominant in the provision of human resource services - welfare, health, and hospital functions. Physical development functions have tended to resist centralization while human resource ones generally have become more centralized.

The allocation of functions among different levels and types of government occurs in at least two distinct fashions. In one case, the government assumes direct functional

Table II-1

Direct Expenditure Responsibility by Level of Government and Specific Function: 1970-1971

panded substate functional responsibilities. A functional assignment policy must take their activities into account.

New-style Federal and State substate districts play a secondary though significant role in performing urban functions. All have planning responsibilities, some have project and grant review powers, and still others perform auxiliary technical assistance that aids the planning and fund raising activities of established units of government. Only a few of these mechanisms directly deliver services or exercise regulatory controls over the programs of established substate jurisdictions. However, the success that various regional councils and State and Federal substate districts have had in their planning and grant-management activities has led some States. to consider the eventual transformation of these instrumentalities into full-scale regional governmental units.

Another recent development in the assignment of functions is the continued popularity of the regional special district. In the 72 largest metropolitan areas,

the number of these bodies has increased from 39 in 1957 to over 94 by 1970. Their significance in functional matters is illustrated by Table II-5, which indicates that in at least half of all surveyed cases, regional special districts account for more than 40 percent of total outlays for certain functions in their metropolitan areas. These units are most important in health and hospitals, sewerage, and utility functions.

The popularity of these specialized regional mechanisms attests to the functional limitations.of more established units of local government. Most of these newer substate bodies have been established by Federal and State governments to promote regional comprehensive planning and to assist in the management of the Federal grant process. Their coordinative, planning, and technical assistance capabilities are intended both to supplement the functional activities of traditional local governments and to insure that aided local programs do not conflict at the regional level. Use of the more traditional regional special district, on the other hand, underscores the

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limited geographic reach of traditional counties and municipalities and the need to have certain physical development and human resource services provided on a uniform basis throughout a metropolitan area. Finally, the few substate bodies that exercise regulatory-style responsibilities provide a system of regulation in which special districts and local governments do not act as their own judges in all cases.

Two other developments concerning substate allocation of functions should be noted. The first involves intergovernmental service agreements and transfers and consolidations of functions that occur among and between local governments in metropolitan areas. As other chapters in this volume and Volume IV note, almost 60 percent of all local governments surveyed have been involved in a formal or informal intergovernmental service agreement, especially in the areas of public health services, planning, police, jails and detention homes, refuse collection, sewage disposal, solid waste disposal, water supply, and libraries (see Table II-6). As Chapter III notes, more governments than are actually involved in intergovernmental service agreements favor shifting of selected functions to larger units of government. Intergovernmental service agreements, then, are a

primary mechanism for reallocating functions in the absence of wholesale structural change.

Finally, major institutional change has occurred in a few metropolitan areas, chiefly Miami, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Nashville-Davidson. In these areas, unified or two-tier governments have been created, with resultant reassignment of functional responsibilities. The scope of some of these specific functional reassignments is illustrated in Tables II-7 to II-10.

All these developments are clear evidence that functions are continually being assigned and reassigned in an urban federal system. Frequently, however, these same developments also indicate that such allocations or reallocations are only of a partial character. Wholesale functional reassignment is the exception rather than the rule on the substate regional scene. Instead, parts of individual functions and activities (i.e., funding, training, regulation, standardsetting, etc.) are frequently assigned to a wide variety of institutions in many substate regions. How the various institutional actors interact in the performance of a function, then, is of the utmost importance. Indeed, the predominant concern of substate intergovernmental relations appears to revolve around

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