Government Size & Efficiency

Government Size & Efficiency

A reader shared this example with me of an interesting problem with consolidating small governmental agencies and made some very useful suggestions:

You mention that many small school districts in Idaho have lots of administration, and wonder if perhaps they should consolidate. Such consolidations can, in the short run, create interesting political problems if the populations of the districts are unequal, especially if rural districts are consolidated with an "urban" district.

For example, my wife grew up just outside State Center, Iowa, population 1349 at the 2000 census. Sometime when she was a kid, they consolidated all the west Marshall County schools into one district. State Center was by far the largest community in the consolidated district. Fortunately, the area is pretty homogenous, and the schools weren't really politicized, but they renamed State Center Elementary to West Marshall Elementary, and named the new middle and high schools to "West Marshall" as a gesture to people from outlying areas who were concerned about State Center "taking over" their schools. (This is the sort of trivial issue that people will get really worked up over if everything is running ok otherwise, and even sometimes when things are really broken.)

One thing I'd suggest is looking at what demands the state (and the counties) make of school districts, and what minimum level of staffing that requires, and see if it's reasonable to reduce some of those demands instead of pushing districts to consolidate. (I'd expect in Idaho that some of those consolidated districts will be rather large geographically, which carries its own costs - how effective will a superintendent be if he has to spend 4 hours on the road to visit some of his schools?) Some of the small school districts may be inefficiently small, but sometimes inefficiency is a cost worth paying for keeping people involved and feeling like they have some control. Reducing the inefficiency while retaining the same level of local control is a better outcome than consolidation, especially if consolidation is "forced" by the state.

One problem with trying to improve efficiency of small districts without consolidation is that in some cases, there might not be enough work to keep someone working full-time at a particular position for a single district--and yet, if you make the job part-time, suddenly, you discover that many potential employees can't afford to take a job without benefits. This is one of those cases where it may make sense to consolidate several governmental agencies--or perhaps arrange for a single employee to be shared by several agencies, full-time with one agency, but with the other agencies sharing the expenses.