One hundred and thirty municipalities
Local control is worth defending. Local control over a trash contract is not what anyone means when they defend it. The useful question is narrower: which functions genuinely benefit from local judgment, and which are simply being duplicated across a fragmented region because nobody built the shared alternative.
First entry April 13, 2022 most recent April 12, 2026
It separates the thing worth protecting from the thing being duplicated, which is the distinction the rest of the series depends on.
Southwestern Pennsylvania runs roughly 130 municipalities, most of them separately negotiating the same contracts, separately procuring the same equipment, and separately trying to staff the same services from a shrinking base. This series works through what that actually costs, one function at a time.
It begins with the least romantic case available, waste collection, precisely because nobody defends the sanctity of local judgment over a hauling contract. It raises the stakes with fire and EMS, where fragmentation is not a procurement inefficiency but a public safety exposure. The middle of the series does the harder work of separating the thing worth protecting from the thing being duplicated: identity, representation and local judgment on one side, dispatch, procurement, training and back office administration on the other.
The conclusion is that regionalism arguments usually fail because they are made at the wrong altitude. Consolidation as a general principle is unpersuasive and probably wrong. Shared delivery of specific functions, chosen because the local judgment involved is negligible, is neither.
What is unresolved is the mechanism. Knowing which functions should be shared has not yet produced a workable answer to who builds the shared thing, and who pays for it before the savings arrive.
- Sep 10, 2023The Significance of Regionalizing Waste Stream ManagementThe first concrete case, chosen because it is the one nobody defends on principle.
- Jan 26, 2025Regionalizing Fire and EMS Services is a No-BrainerRaised the stakes from procurement cost to public safety capacity.
- Sep 26, 2025Boundaries Don’t Breathe. Communities Do.Drew the line between local identity, which is real, and duplicated administration, which is not.
- Mar 16, 2026Stop Making 130 Municipalities Reinvent the Trash ContractReturned to the original case with a sharper account of what shared delivery actually requires.
8 essays, newest first.
Nothing matches .
Try a broader term, or a concept rather than a phrase: pensions, regionalism, streets, workforce.