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Oct

15

It’s the Ohio government structure, stupid


“Employment Growth, Future Prospects, and Change at the Ohio Rural-Urban Interface” is the second in a series of reports being done by Mark Partridge, the Swank Professor of Rural-Urban Policy, and Jill Clark, program manager of the Exurban Change Project. According to the press release noted below, this report for the “Growth and Change” series examines economic and demographic trends in the state.

As noted in this Capital Blog post (which is based on this press release):

Traditional explanations of the state’s downturn don’t make much sense under scrutiny, the researchers said. There’s simply not sufficient evidence to blame Ohio’s continuing poor performance on popular explanations, such as a declining manufacturing base or bad Midwestern weather, because other Great Lake states face the same problems.

“Let’s stop blaming the loss of manufacturing and start looking at some things that are more systemic,” Clark said. “Those things are harder to address, but we need to start looking at them.”

In particular, the state’s governmental structure caught the researchers’ eyes.

“We have expensive government,” Partridge said. “I’m not saying we’re wasteful, but when you have a governmental body, you need boards, overseers, all kinds of overhead that aren’t truly necessary to provide services. The problem lies in how we set up Ohio’s government in the 19th century. Is this really how we want to do business in the 21st century?”

Clark said that not all Great Lakes states have a governmental structure like Ohio’s, in which every village, township and county have separate governing boards and councils. States that have “thinner” governments, such as Wisconsin or Minnesota, tend to be doing better economically than those that have more governmental layers, such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

“Ohio has so many villages and townships, and most have their own fire department,” Clark said. “The state should consider offering incentives to work more regionally.”

Replacing the current governmental structure with a leaner, regionally focused structure is a tall order, the researchers admit. But in the long run, making the transition would pay off.

So all the talk we hear about regionalism – makes you wonder, just a wee bit – which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 10:40 pm October 15th, 2007 in Business, Government, Ohio, Statehouse 

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