Can’t We Dump Some of Our 3300 Special Districts?
By Peter Schrag
California Progress Report
Posted on 09 May 2011
Even if Gov. Jerry Brown doesn’t succeed in shutting down California’s redevelopment agencies, hardly a sure thing, he might usefully turn his attention to the state’s costly tangle of special districts.
There are some 3300 of them, depending on who’s counting -- fire districts, park districts, community services districts, mosquito abatement districts, water districts, transit districts, sanitation districts, cemetery districts, etc. Don’t tell me we really need them all.
Despite the huge sums they spend, the essential services many provide, and the big piles of cash they sit on, most of them are nearly invisible to the media and the voters, except in cases of scandal.
California has 58 counties, 400-plus incorporated cities, 300-plus general law cities, 900-plus school districts and countless other jurisdictions. Each of us lives in one of them. But we may live in three or four special districts, about which most of us know next to nothing.
Some special districts provide important services, especially in rural areas, and they have the virtue of being close to their communities; some are redundant and could well be consolidated with others for greater efficiency; some are vestiges of another era and provide no service at all. A decade ago, the state’s Little Hoover Commission reported that while 24 hospital districts leased or closed their hospitals, “the districts endure. Nearly half of them pay meeting stipends or benefits to elected board members.” Do any of them still endure?
Because there are so many special districts and because they provide so great a variety of services, and because some, like municipal utilities, are enterprise districts whose revenues come from the services they provide, while others depend largely on the property tax, no generalization is easy and no quick across-the-board reform is likely. But some things are certain.
While many of their board members serve gratis, and some take modest compensation -- $100 or $200 per meeting, others are nicely compensated, especially in generous health care programs. The Little Hoover Commission found that in 15 percent of the state’s districts, board members received more than $5000 annually in compensation. In a few, they got $20,000 or more.
Many districts are also top-heavy with well-paid administrators and supervisors (in 2009 fifteen of them earned over $300,000 a year). Meanwhile fire captains in those fire districts, like many other public safety employees in this state, can retire at 50 with close to 90 percent of their top pay. Consolidating districts could eliminate a lot of high-paid brass – and, of course, all those duplicate board members.
The districts, according to numbers from state Controller John Chiang, are sitting on some $41 billion in reserves, half of it unrestricted, while the counties in which they operate are starving for funds. Defenders of the system will argue that that protects vital services from irresponsible politicians. But in a democracy with representative government, that’s not how things are supposed to work.
But the more important gains from reducing the number of districts is simply in accountability within counties where one level of elected government officials – generally the supervisors -- appropriates the funds while another spends them.
In a recent edition of its report, What So Special About Special Districts, the state Senate Local Government Committee, pointed to the difficulty for residents in determining who’s in charge when “separate special districts provide water, sewer, parks, library, and fire protection services to the same unincorporated community…
“Furthermore, the narrow and technical nature of a district’s activities often results in low civic visibility until a crisis arises. Special district elections typically have very low voter turnouts.” The same is true for attendance at district board meetings.
In the past decade, the legislature enacted a series of laws – among them a requirement that board members who get paid receive periodic ethics training – to check some of the redundancy, abuses and confusion associated with the morass of special districts.
But the reforms, among them provisions requiring LAFCOs, the regional Local Agency Formation Commissions, to create plans that would check jurisdictional overlap and conflict, have themselves increased the system’s opacity and generated resistance from some districts charging unwarranted interference in their affairs.
California voters are consistently asked to vote in too many races and decide on too many issues – in some jurisdictions oxymoronically making informed choices on more than a hundred offices and ballot measures.
Both for the sake of efficiency and accountability – and for the kind of transparency that allows voters to understand the system that’s supposed to work for them, the fewer layers of government – state and local – the better.
Given our political culture, it may be hard to soon consolidate most special districts, or have counties take them over, even though local voters rarely have a clue about who runs them or how. But as California’s ever-more desperate leaders cast around for both savings and efficiency – and maybe for a little better government generally – special districts should make for fat, tempting targets.
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Peter Schrag, whose exclusive weekly column appears every Monday in the California Progress Report, is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future and California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. His new book, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism, Eugenics, Immigration is now on sale.
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