Sharp words in merger debate’s home stretch

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Depending on which side is talking, the question in voters’ minds on Nov. 2 is whether blending Polk County and Des Moines city governments would save millions of dollars and bolster the metro area’s economic prowess, or potentially hand control of the capital city to suburban leaders unaffected by the new governmental body’s taxing and fiscal policies.

Both sides of the merger issue exchanged sharp words last week as the campaign entered its final days. A spokesman for the pro-merger group Citizens for Unified Government reacted strongly to last Tuesday’s 4-0 vote opposing the plan by the county Board of Supervisors, saying taking a position on an issue before voters was “unethical” and “self-serving.” Earlier this month, four members of the Des Moines City Council opposed it as well.

“The Polk County supervisors have a clear political and financial stake in continuing the status quo and ensuring the future of their jobs,” spokesman Jeffrey Bergman said, explaining that supervisors earn $76,000 annually and have generous benefits that boost their pay to around $95,000. “Their self-serving action underscores the need for local government reform.”

On the other side, critics say the plan isn’t resonating with voters, who aren’t eager to give control over city matters to people who don’t live in Des Moines. Under the plan, “the city of Des Moines is the only city in the county that gives up its right to self-govern, its checkbook and control of its policies to people who do not live in the city,” said Ned Chiodo, a leader in the grass-roots “Vote No Merger” group, a member of the commission that drafted the charter proposal and a veteran county and state policymaker.

“Why is it good for Des Moines and not good for any other city in the county?” he said. “That should be a big flag right there. Why do we as citizens of Des Moines have to give up our right to services?”

Behind the prickly rhetoric is a proposal to fundamentally change the way Polk County citizens are governed. The current board of supervisors and city councils would be dissolved, and voters would elect the first 15-member Des Moines-Polk County government in November 2006. The proposal may be viewed in its entirety at www.unifiedgovernment.org. Arguments against charter government are found at www.votenomerger.com.

Much of the debate surrounding the issue is philosophical, as the charter proposal doesn’t specify where efficiencies would be gained. Doing so would have been “highly presumptuous” on the part of the commission, neighborhood activist Bob Mickle, a strong advocate of consolidation, said at a recent press conference. Without clearly outlining where the savings will be achieved, the pro-merger campaign is nothing but “slogans and themes,” Chiodo said.

Supporters say the plan could result in immediate savings of around $5 million, but the anti-merger group counters that the City Council and Board of Supervisors already have achieved most of the savings by eliminating half of the positions cited in a study commissioned by the pro-merger group.

The report doesn’t contemplate the effect of consolidating the eight union contracts in effect in Polk County and Des Moines and other issues surrounding equalization of pay andbenefits, Chiodo said. His group believes doing so would increase costs by $8 million, and further personnel cuts would decrease costs by only $2 million. “By my math, that’s a $6 million cost increase,” Chiodo said.

Proponents say the real savings would be achieved by combining administrative positions. Other personnel cuts could be handled through retirement and attrition and not affect frontline service providers, a key concern of some opponents of the plan, former state auditor Richard Johnson said at a press conference. Johnson, who was the administrative director of the Iowa Department of Transportation before he was elected state auditor, shepherded several state office mergers and expects cost savings to be greater than the report estimates.

“The real savings will not come about by reducing the number of people,” he said, “but by reducing administrative layers.”

The most important issue before voters, Johnson said, “is what this change offers them as residents of the largest local governments within the state of Iowa.”

“Right now, residents of Des Moines and other incorporated cities, from West Des Moines to Ankeny to Polk City, are served by two sets of government institutions for many of the same purposes,” Johnson said. “Sometimes they cooperate, sometimes they may not, but citizens always pay for both. This defies common sense and good economics.”

Des Moines’ suburbs could join the combined government at a later date, but Chiodo’s group doubts that will happen. “Nowhere in the country has any suburban city joined this kind of merger at a later date, so why is it going to be any different here?” he said. “People in the suburbs don’t want to merge with Des Moines because they don’t want to pay its higher taxes, and that ain’t going to change. Until we get some equality in taxation, that’s not going to be in their best interest.”

The Polk County-Des Moines council could shift some of Des Moines’ tax burden to taxpayers countywide, but Chiodo is skeptical that would actually happen. It’s naïve to think elected officials from the suburbs or rural Polk County would be eager to raise their own taxes, he said.

Johnson, however, said suburban officials elected to the combined government likely wouldn’t put their self-interests ahead of the greater good. “If they presented a budget with duplication of services, that would be hard to sell to the council,” he said.

The proposal also has garnered the support of the Greater Des Moines Partnership, which in April endorsed the regional approach to government that meshes well with the business group’s economic development objectives. If voters approve the plan, Des Moines would again be one of the nation’s 100 largest cities, the pro-merger group says. The city currently is the 102nd largest municipality in the country.

Lance Noe, an assistant professor of public administration at Drake University and a consultant to the charter commission, said that could attract more federal resources to the city and also stimulate private-sector investment.

The combined population of Des Moines and Polk County would be more than 222,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, which would make Des Moines the nation’s 80th largest city. “For business development purposes, if our unified population were counted as Lousiville’s, Indianapolis’ and Nashville’s (other regions that have adopted charter government), Des Moines would be boosted all the way to 44th place,”

Chiodo said officials in Louisville, Ky., where a plan similar to the one before Polk County voters took effect last January, have touted the higher population figure and are now “being ridiculed.”

“People in economic development know the same amount of people would be living in the Des Moines area after the merger as before,” Chiodo said. “It’s trick-up numbers that don’t change how many people live here. I hate to think about basing economic development plans on trying to fool people with numbers. This doesn’t change anything.”

Chiodo said his group applauds efforts to make government more efficient, and he personally would support a merger that joined the governments of Polk County, Des Moines and all of the metro area’s suburbs. “A true merger would be worth considering,” he said. An effort to do that got the support of about 35 percent of Polk County voters in 1993.