By Larry N. Gerston
Special to the Mercury News
Posted: 07/10/2010 08:00:00 PM PDT
The recommendation by the Santa Clara County civil grand jury to consolidate school districts is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking long overdue in this county. The report suggests that aligning K-8 districts with high school districts would improve education and produce savings in the neighborhood of 7 percent, or $51 million annually. That's a lot of teachers and specialists at a time when cutbacks are threatening irreparable harm to our students.
The recommendations are a good start for schools, but the same thing needs to be done in other service areas in the Bay Area. For example, Santa Clara County has 11 local police departments plus the Sheriff's Office, and seven fire departments plus the Santa Clara County Fire Department. Why, in a mostly urban, compact environment, must we endure such duplication? The answer is we shouldn't.
Reasons offered for school consolidation are equally valid for police and fire departments. To quote the grand jury report, "The current organization [of school districts] is an outgrowth of the county's origins. Until the 1960s, the county was largely a collection of agricultural communities separated by miles of open space. "... The communities have become small cities, San Jose has become a large city, and the open land has disappeared."
And so it is with our other local government services. For years, various agreements have allowed these agencies to work in nearby communities in cases of emergencies. Why should only emergencies be the reason?
Just imagine the cost savings that would accrue from one police department and one fire department. With such reorganization, 10 police chiefs and six fire chiefs would disappear, along with numerous assistants and duplicative equipment and record-keeping systems. The dollar savings could be massive, and services could be coordinated to provide faster response times. At a time of overstretched resources and abandoned services, nothing could make more sense.
So why hasn't consolidation taken place?
Actually, some U.S. cities and counties have consolidated services and programs. Locally, San Carlos in San Mateo County is dissolving its police force and contracting with the sheriff's department at a savings of more than $2 million annually. And that's just for a 32-member police force. Imagine what could happen in Santa Clara County.
But there is tremendous resistance from two camps. First, the affected departments themselves don't want to surrender their autonomy and jobs. Second, residents of small communities don't want to lose their proximity to local institutions. Both arguments may be reasonable in an era of abundant resources, but that time is long gone.
Some people will caution against these reforms lest Santa Clara County take on the characteristics of Los Angeles County or even the massive Los Angeles Unified School District. To be sure, there is a point at which the jurisdiction becomes so massive that it is dysfunctional. But behemoth Los Angeles County has nearly 10 million people who live in 80 cities spread out over 4,000 square miles. Much more compact Santa Clara County has 1.8 million residents in 15 cities within a footprint of 1,300 square miles. In short, consolidation would require the cooperation of fewer governments in a much smaller land area.
Consolidation will generate push-back from traditionalists and folks who want to leave things as they've always been. Fair enough. But when you see after-school programs shut down, senior centers eliminated, libraries and parks closed, and local streets in disrepair, just remember the funds for those things and more are being sucked up by duplicative programs. We can no longer afford to pay the price.
LARRY N. GERSTON teaches public policy at San Jose State University. His most recent book is Confronting Reality: Ten Issues Threatening to Implode American Society (and How We Can Fix It). He wrote this article for this newspaper.
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_15479296?nclick_check=1
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