City–County Consolidation: Promises Made, Promises Kept?

2 An Assessment of the City-County Consolidation of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee

25 ! 2 " An Assessment of the City–County Consolidation of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee City–County Consolidation of Nashville and Davidson County Anthony J. Nownes, David J. Houston, and Marc Schwerdt Map 2 Locations of Davidson County and Knox County, Tennessee Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census. 26 City–County Consolidation of Nashville and Davidson County City–county consolidation is a rare event. But it does happen. In fact, some of the largest and best-known metropolises in the country are governed by consolidated governments, including Boston, Denver, Honolulu, Philadelphia , and San Francisco. This chapter examines the case of Nashville/ Davidson County, Tennessee (map 2), a large locality that has been governed by a consolidated government for forty-five years. To evaluate the performance of the consolidated government of Nashville/Davidson County, we compare it with that of the fragmented governments of Knox County, Tennessee, and the City of Knoxville. We begin with a brief background on the consolidation effort, highlighting the promises made by consolidation supporters. From here, we discuss our methodology. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the consolidated government of Nashville/Davidson County. In the end, we conclude that there is substantial evidence that consolidation has been good for Nashville/Davidson County. The Consolidation Effort The Nashville/Davidson County metropolitan government opened for business on April 1, 1963, replacing the separate governments of the City of Nashville and of Davidson County. This event was merely the culmination of a decades-long effort to address the problems that had come to plague metropolitan Nashville. In the two decades before consolidation, the forces of suburbanization pushed beyond the Nashville city limits out into surrounding counties, creating an urban fringe that strained the resources and government outside the city limits. Because the city itself did not grow in size during this preconsolidation period, its population in 1960 was only 2.1 percent larger than it had been in 1940. In contrast, during the same twenty-year period the population of Davidson County outside Nashville grew from 89,865 to 228,869—an increase of 155 percent (Hawkins 1966). No longer did the political boundaries of the city match up with the urbanized area. Additionally , the county government was not equipped to provide the urban-type services needed by people living in a densely populated area (Booth 1963). In short, by 1960 it was clear that the governments of Davidson County and Nashville were having trouble providing necessary services to citizens. The First Election In 1951, a group of local government officials requested that the Tennessee state legislature authorize a formal examination of the problems facing The Consolidation Effort 27 metropolitan Nashville. The resulting Community Services Act authorized the establishment of a Nashville/Davidson County joint Community Services Commission that produced a set of recommendations to address the metropolitan problems. The report, titled A Future for Nashville, was produced by the commission the following year (Greene and Grant 1952). The report recommended that the city annex 69 square miles of suburban land outside its limits, and that the governments of Nashville and Davidson County consider the functional consolidation of certain areawide services. As a result of the report, both the city’s health department and juvenile court were transferred to the county. However, competition between the city and the county in other areas (including schools and law enforcement) precluded further functional consolidation. Moreover, the Tennessee legislature failed to act on the annexation recommendation (Hawkins 1966). In the end, the commission’s report led to only minor changes. However, it succeeded in stimulating widespread interest in the problems facing metropolitan Nashville. Although annexation and the functional consolidation of specific services were regarded as the most feasible responses to these problems , many local actors believed that the commission’s recommendations went only part of the way toward addressing existing problems. During the next few years, two legal changes paved the way for additional efforts to address the problems of metropolitan Nashville. First, the state legislature amended the state Constitution in 1953 to vest in the General Assembly the authority to provide for the consolidation of city and county governments in the state provided that consolidation is approved by separate majorities of voters both in the city and the county outside the city (Hawkins 1966). Second, in 1955 the Tennessee Municipal League convinced the General Assembly to relax annexation laws. Specifically, the state legislature changed the law to allow the...