 Welcome, everyone, to the fourth Juice South Lectures in Planning series of the semester. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming Jen Nels, a researcher, professor and consultant specializing in the area of metropolitan governance and regional economic development. Professor Nels is particularly interested in developing ways of improving coordination between local authorities to address modern social, economic and environmental issues that inevitably transcend geographical and jurisdictional boundaries. She's the author of Comparative Metropolitan Policy, governing beyond local boundaries in the Imagine Metropolis, co-author of A Quiet Evolution, the emergence of indigenous local intergovernmental partnerships in Canada, and discovering American regionalism and an introduction to regional intergovernmental organization. She's currently an adjunct professor in urban policy and planning at Hunter College, and today's lecture will summarize some of the data in her latest book, discovering American regionalism and present a new way to conceptualize regional intergovernmental organizations and the role they play in regional policy coordination. After the lecture, we'll open the floor for questions. And with this, please join me in welcoming our speaker. Can you guys hear me if I'm here? Like, I like to wander around a little bit. So, if you can't just yell at me and I will move over here. All right. Thanks for coming today. It's cool to be back here. I was at the lips. Lips? Just lips? I want to say like four years ago, talking about something else, but also regional related. So I guess probably none of you were here for that. Here we go. We're going to do it again with a new twist. So today I'm going to talk about regionalism in America, unpacking a deep tradition of governance. And at this point, usually I get a lot of like blank stares, maybe some giggles, sometimes an eye roll or two, because people that I present this stuff to generally don't get regionalism. They're not super into it. They're like, I don't know who cares. It's not really your fault if you're having that reaction. Regionalism kind of gets short shrift, right? It gets sort of an afterthought in a lot of our programs and education. So I can't speak to the curriculum up here, which I'm sure is much more thorough than everywhere else I've been. Sorry. Much more thorough. But almost everywhere else I've taught and kind of interacted with in political science programs, planning programs, geography. Regions are a little bit of an afterthought. And here what I'm talking about when I talk about regions, I'm thinking about this from a more political science and perspective in the sense of agglomerations of jurisdictions. So this would be a multi-jurisdiction, all agglomeration of some sort. Usually we're talking about metropolitan regions. Today, and usually I only really care about metropolitan regions, but as you'll see later as we go through this, the regions that I'm going to talk about will also include some non-metropolitan regions as well. Anyway, so regions are a bit of an afterthought. And even at Hunter College, which I think is a great place to be, there's only one course that's a core course, thankfully, that I teach most of the time, that even discusses regions at all. And otherwise it's just sort of like maybe a unit that you get in a planning course or something that kind of comes up every now and again. And then when it does come up, often we're told that it's actually not really happening or important in America. The old standards get trotted out. The Met Councils in Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, St. Paul are kind of thrown out there. If you're lucky, you get a little bit of two-tier government in the form of Metro Toronto, which actually is where I'm from. That was a two-tier system that was much in vogue in planning and geography and political science circles for a while. It started in the 50s, ended in the late 90s. We still talk about it for some reason. Anyway, so those are trotted out as sort of the things that are regionalism, regional governments, those matter, but everything else is sort of like not that important. And I'm here today to challenge that. First of all, it is important. Secondly, it is happening in America. There's tons of regional activity occurring in regional governments across jurisdictional boundaries. And not only that, like mind blown, it's a deep tradition. This is not something that is brand new that I'm like thrown in front of you and be like, yesterday we started doing this. No, it goes way back. And I'll show you that. So get ready, mind blown. Okay, so since I have no idea what the baseline is here on caring about regions or knowing about them, I thought maybe a quick refresher on why we like to think about coordinating policies particularly in activities across regional boundaries matters. This is the New York metropolitan statistical area, which is, you probably have a pretty good sense of geography, it's pretty big. It's a pretty big thing, there are 26 counties and over 20 million people live in this jurisdiction and that's complicated. We need to think a little bit about cross jurisdictional boundaries here and there's a whole bunch of reasons to do that. So one of them is that while we tend to think about local governments as fairly autonomous like they're, we've got this American tradition of local autonomy being very strong both in principle and ideologically. But I think about it, local governments are like really far down the pecking order. They're right at the bottom of the government hierarchy and so no matter how autonomous they are in their own little worlds they are constrained by the actions of others. So obviously state and federal policy act as constraints on what local governments can practically accomplish even within their boundaries of local autonomy. So if you think about that, that's sort of a vertical constraint but there are horizontal constraints as well. Local authorities, local governments are constrained by the decisions of their neighbors. Just like we are constrained by the decisions of our neighbors. If your neighbors' slides have a super loud party you're dealing with that. It doesn't matter if there's a wall, it doesn't matter. So here's a non-exhaustive list about why we care about what's going on with our neighbors and why we might want to get together with them occasionally. Think about coordinating policy and making policy on a regional scale. So one I've already mentioned, externalities. Your noisy neighbors having a loud party, that affects you no matter how quiet you're being. No matter how quiet you make your kids and pets be. If your neighbor is not then you're dealing with it, right? I mean the actual urban planning kind of analogy of that is you can plan a park space, a beautiful park on the boundaries of your municipality and populate it with butterflies and animals and your neighbor puts a huge sticky factory right next to that. You can't do anything about it. It's their land use plan, not yours. So those are externalities that you have to deal with. So at that point you probably well before that point you probably want to talk to your neighbor. And maybe just harmonize what you're doing on the boundaries there so that you're not stepping on each other's toes. So externalities and that's just like a trivial example. Economies of scale you're probably familiar with, right? Sometimes you're too small to be able to provide a service. Snow removal, fire protection, water systems, power systems for instance, right? So you get together with your neighbors until there are enough of you that you can afford it. And so those create economies of scale. Mandates, sometimes the federal or state government makes you cooperate with your neighbor because they want you to for a variety of reasons. Metropolitan planning organizations are mandated by the federal government in order to access transportation funding for every urban area over 50,000 people. So if you want any transportation funding money you need to create a metropolitan planning organization and that is a form of regional governance. Competitiveness is something that comes up occasionally as well, right? When you're trying to attract investment if you're a smaller place or even if you're a central city sometimes it's useful to point to all of the beautiful amenities of your region in order to attract that investment because you're not going to put an auto plant in the middle of downtown you're going to put it somewhere else that's going to draw on the logistics infrastructure of an entire region. A really good example of this is the HQ2 beauty contest. Some places put in bids that were regional so they got together with their neighbor to do that and that was kind of an interesting example of that in practice. Some places did not. New York is one of those places that did not. We'll see. New York can play any role in that. Finally, and this is not final because I could go out all day but spatial equity is an issue too. A lot of times central cities are responsible for providing all sorts of things like infrastructure or cultural amenities is another good example and they kind of disproportionately bear the brunt of that and so sometimes it's nice to, since that is a kind of regional amenity get together and try and fund those things collectively. So that's one example of that. I'm not bore you with these but as you can see there are a whole bunch of reasons why one would want to coordinate across jurisdiction boundaries and because of that we've been thinking about how to do it for kind of a long time and come up with a lot of fun ways to do it. I will not go through these in exhaustive detail but just to hit the high point. First, just like to note this government to governments this is sort of one way I like to think about the way I've organized these. The ones at the top that are closer to the top are closer to using solutions that look like governments. They're hierarchical, they're top-down, they have specific mandates. Usually they have tax-raising authority or some sort of power to compel so that within those regional arrangements the members of it must comply with for whatever reason. Closer to the bottom we're talking governments. These are horizontally negotiated network type things based on cooperation, usually voluntary, and there's no power to compel here, no formal power institutionalized here. It's all kind of persuasion to try and get to work together regionally. So starting at the top I'm a super easy way to do this is if you can find out that you've got something that crosses jurisdictional boundaries and you're like, how do we deal with it? Sometimes we just kick it up to the state level. I say state and provincial again I come from Canada where in Canada we're a lot more aggressive about the provinces swooping in and just being like you know what you guys are not handling this we're just gonna take over. So that happens a bunch. Another way is to harmonize the functional boundaries and the political boundaries. So like if you have a situation where you've got externalities or you need economies of scale of some sort and your political boundaries aren't working out you can harmonize those in a variety of ways. One is annexation. You can, a city can grow by taking over control of its neighbors. Amalgamation is another one where everybody sort of combined into one big authority. Metropolitan Toronto, which is a two-tier system that I mentioned, became amalgamated in 1998. So all of the sort of internal jurisdictional boundaries disappear, it's all one thing. That's amalgamation. And consolidation is another one which is a word that sounds a lot like amalgamation and honestly I use them differently but that's when it's sort of a similar idea but we get it here in the United States with city and county consolidation where the city that is nested within the county spatially just becomes the county. So those boundaries just become the same. So the county stops existing and the city becomes that they stay. And it's their governance one thing. So that's a government, a very government solution to this. You can add another layer of government. That's fun, right? What the heck? There's no abolished governments. Nobody really wants to be rolled into another thing. So it's a little bit easier sometimes to just plop another layer on top. And I'll get into a bit of trouble by saying this but the Met Councils are kind of a good example or an example from one perspective of that where the local government still exists and they just like plopped and metropolitan level on top of that. So that's a two-tier arrangement. There are also special purpose districts which are another way of kind of just adding another layer of government. Here it's a school district or a water district or a power district or whatever. That's usually a single purpose organization that has a geography that's useful for that purpose. So that's adding another layer of government. And that's sort of the end of the like seriously government solutions. And we start to get into the more governance territory. You can create regional intergovernmental organizations which, spoiler alert, is what the rest of this is going to be about. But just to like for the purpose of this list basically what these are, voluntary, I'm going to put this on quotation marks because there's like some caveats to that, voluntary arrangements of local governments that come together into things that, you know, you may have heard of councils of governments or regional planning commissions or economic development districts. So they come together for various reasons. Usually these intergovernmental organizations are fairly permanent. They've existed for a while and they deal with multiple issues so that distinguishes them from special purpose districts. And they don't really have formal powers, right? They rarely have any taxing powers. They don't really have any powers to make their members do anything. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. But just quickly, the last three here, establishing interlocal agreements, that's another thing you probably have come across. More, we talk about this a lot in planning. Our interlocal agreements, these are usually service agreements where one party will contract with another or a group of parties will contract with one another to provide a service. So this will be, again, we're in the trash collection, fire protection, kind of water provision racket here. Lots and lots written on that and it's a really rich literature. In formal cooperation, you could just, you know, pick up the phone, ring ring, like say. You don't really need a formal name or an acronym or an organization to do it. Just sort of have these conventions where you talk to your neighbors about various things. So those are things. And then you can rely on civic organizations for leadership. Regional plan association here in New York is a good example. This is not driven by government. It's driven by the private sector. And those are advocacy organizations very interested in governing across jurisdictional boundaries, very interested in getting things happening, but that are not themselves governments. So as I mentioned, we're going to focus on creating regional intergovernmental organizations. And I have actually, there's a lot going on on this slide. I'm sorry. I have pointed out that people don't feel awesome about regional governments organizations or regional intergovernmental organizations in general. Here's some quotes from Hamilton's book in 2014. He doesn't pull very many punches. He says they're created to give the illusion that something is being done. They fail to develop strong political support. So basically they don't matter, and they only have a real sort of weak sense of region for planning purposes. There are all sorts of other things that people will level against these regional intergovernmental organizations. Usually things related to the fact that they don't have formal powers. So like how can they get anything done? Seriously. Usually they have very limited revenue streams as well. And there's also, and I'll get to this in a little bit, a whole line of critique about how decision-making is very skewed within these organizations. Because if you think of like a traditional monocentric city region, or metropolitan region, you have like a big huge bethahima like New York City or Boston or Chicago. And then like a bunch of suburbs around it. There are suburbs kind of outnumber the city. And so there's this real perception that like how on earth could anything like really effective be happening there when the city is so overwhelmed and outnumbered and like it's just not going to get anything done. Yeah, so that's a thing that I'm concerned about. I work with my colleague David Miller, who is at the University of Pittsburgh. And we've been tackling this question of sort of, what's up with regional governance organizations? Are they like really that bad? That doesn't seem right to us. There gotta be hundreds out there. Are they all bad? The literature would have you believe that pretty much yeah. And sort of as we were starting to go through that literature we started to realize that we actually weren't talking about the same thing. So like people were saying regional councils or they were saying regional planning organizations or just regional organizations, regional governance organizations. They were using all these words to level these critiques but they weren't defining them rigorously and they weren't being consistent in the definitions that they actually did select when they did use them. So that sort of made us back up a little bit to be like, you know, me. We don't have a good sense of what these things actually are and we should probably do that before we tear them a new one. So our argument essentially is that we needed some more conceptual clarity about what these regional governance organizations are. Like we just really haven't come to know. One of the reasons I'm like this doesn't probably, it's probably not gonna make sense to you, but they go by like a billion different names and so development districts, planning commissions, regional planning commissions, all these things have been like kind of lumped together. Sometimes people are talking about planning commissions, sometimes they're talking about regional, they're talking about development councils, sometimes they're talking about associations of governments, sometimes they squish them all together and are talking about everything. But there was again, there was no consistency. The term regional councils has sort of emerged as something that you'll find in the literature but again that definition varies by author to the extent that they even have one. And it's just so it's not clearly defined. And then another thing that we found is that this notion that regional governance is not effective, it doesn't really exist, it's not important was based on case studies, which is fine, we have nothing against case studies, but they're like pretty sparse and then also really old research. Like some of the studies that people are citing are like 1976, 1989. You're like, okay, well, maybe we need to update this. So we are arguing that. It's time for a clear rigorous methodology for defining what these things are. We want an updated empirical research. And then I think we can start being critical about these things. So that's what we did. How about this book? Very affordable. In soft cover and everything. We, being myself, David Miller, and then we had some collaborators on the book. George Doherty and our PhD student, PhD student Jay Rigaba, came up with the term regional intergovernmental organization, or RIGOs. And we decided that we would start from a definition of what we were looking for and then go find them and learn about them. So we're going to open the kimono just a tiny bit here. This is our rigorous methodology. Just give you a peek about how research happens. These are, we're happy with these categories. This is still sort of a work in progress. We use these categories to enumerate RIGOs across the United States. Now that we've done it, when we did that data work, it was like two years ago, two and a half years ago now, we're kind of like coming back to it and being like sober after all the fun. Looking at some cases and being like, is it? So this is scholarship, right? It isn't like we got it and we nailed it on the first try and we figured it out. But these basic principles are going to stick around. And so how do we determine what a RIGO is? Well, first we looked at all sorts of things that we thought might be RIGOs and we applied these five criteria. So first membership, it had to be primarily constituted by general purpose local governments. So it had to be made up of sort of like municipalities, counties, that sort of townships depending on where you are. And that made sense. 21% of the membership had to be cities, counties, municipalities, whatever. So that was first, fine. And that gets us away from things like the RPA and chambers of commerce and other things that do stuff across regional boundaries but aren't based on local governments. Secondly, the agenda had to be a multi-agenda, multi-policy thing. We were not looking for special purpose districts. We were looking for organizations that tried to coordinate policies across multiple-issue areas. And so we picked, we have a list of eight. You'll see that later. And we had the number that you had to have was three in order to count. If you didn't have three, it's not in. Three was the one. Legitimacy, this is an interesting one and actually one that we're debating a little bit about like where do we draw the line. But basically what we wanted to see here was that the organizations that we found weren't just like, they had some credibility with other levels of government, essentially. And so we were looking at legitimacy as that state or federal governments had selected those organizations to perform specific delegated policy goals. So you could be an economic development district, an area agency on agent. You could be a multi-policy planning organization. There are a whole bunch of these things. And we're still like tinkering like, okay, does this fit, does that fit. But those three are a good example of what we're looking for. Ambition, this is also a tricky one to measure, but the important thing here is that the organization in its mission statement and its purpose and its public-facing documents is billing itself as a voice of the community rather than advocate for its members. And that distinction is very subtle. So one is that we are the voice of a region. The second one is we are going to fight for municipalities at other levels of government. That's more of a lobby organization for municipalities or counties or whatever. When you have the ambition to be a regional organization, you are speaking for the region rather than the individual members. And finally, scale. And this is where we cut a lot, right? We decided for a variety of reasons that I can go into later, that we wanted one rego per region. We did not want a lot of these things. And I can go into why. And so we picked the biggest one. Seemed like the way to go. And I can get into that in more detail. So you can meet the regos of America. We found 477 regional and governmental organizations that fit. Ignore the colors. The colors are population. They're very strange. One thing you might notice is where there is no color. Oh, I'm trying to read this. There's a mysterious gap up here where we are. Anyway, you'll notice that there are some white spots. A lot of that's rural. 83% of the U.S. population is served by at least one rego. And I say at least one because there are overlaps in certain places. And almost every state has one of these things. We have made a database that is available at our website. That you can... I don't know if it does it through the rest. But yeah, our database is here. It's open source. We have the geographies of all these things. We have population numbers. We have everything that you could possibly... Not everything you could possibly want. Why would I say that? It was like a lot of stuff that you could play with. And that database, we are hoping to update because as I mentioned, two and a half years has passed. Stuff has changed. We're going to try and sort that out. But it gives you a good idea. You can do lots of fun stuff with it. So those are regos of America. And now it's time for some descriptive statistics. Are you excited? You know what? I don't really care about statistics that much. So I'm just going to give you the big picture here. Regos are in most states. There are a couple of states that don't have regos. They're weird states, right? I can say that, right? Delaware. That's kind of a weird state. Rhode Island. These are really small places where the state government usually takes care of the things that would be regional. Hawaii is one as well. It's sort of got a strange... its own strange thing. And I think it's because it's just far away. I don't know if there are others. I'm trying to remember. There are pretty much everywhere. Red states, blue states, purple states. This is not an ideological thing. There are big states, small states, and urban states, rural states. They are all over the place. Also, this is very small. It doesn't really matter. These are a lot of numbers. The deal is that they're in large regions and they're in small regions. We have regos that are under 250,000 people. We have regions that are extra large. Right? We have over time and overnight. People that doesn't sound extra large from what we're saying, but from a rego perspective, that's the rest of the country that it is. You can break it down by how many of these regos are in whatever part of the country it shouldn't care to you. The big point is that they're all over the place. They're not just metropolitan. They're not just big metropolitan. They are everywhere. This is also probably pretty small. I'll just walk you through it. They're involved in many policy areas. Remember I said that there were eight policy areas that we sort of looked at. Maybe I said that. I probably did. Eight policy areas. They're here, economic and workforce development, agency here services, housing, community development, and then sort of a bunch of environmental things here. Transportation, wind, use public safety, and security services. A lot of these things are service providers as well, and there's fair time. Actually, many of them are. Providing some sort of constituent service. So, as you can see, there are not just in transportation. When we first started doing this, I was like, well, all of them are going to do transportation. You think about what kind of stuff you want to govern across jurisdictional boundaries. Well, that's your rail lines and your bus routes. You want to make sure that your roads connect to one another and all sorts of stuff like that. And obviously, this sort of makes it look silly because if you broke down into rural and urban transportation, you obviously stack those together and give them a pretty long one. Economic development is obviously a big one. Housing and community development is another huge one. This is really, was an interesting one for us. And then, you know, some of these other things are aging and senior services is mostly connected to the area agency on the aging mandate that some of these regos have. So anyway, they do a lot of different things. So many different policy areas. And there's obviously tons of granularity under all of these. This one's the big like, well, at least for me. Regos have been around for a long time. Super duper long time. So you can see that most of the regos had been formed by the end of 1974. That's pretty impressive. Okay, so they've been around for forever. I recently did a cool podcast with some rego executive directors. And their regos were on average 50 years old. It was insanity when people were like, wait, you've been around all this time and no one's been paying any attention to you at all. Shameful. Let's change that. Spatial relationships. We're going to buzz through this. One thing that's kind of interesting, this is kind of my jam, although I don't know quite what to do with it yet. Here you go. This is a map of the metropolitan statistical areas of the United States. That is the map of regos. Let's leave that there. They're very different. They're very different. We call that spatial dissimilarity. So what ends up happening is that what I had originally thought was like, oh, regos are just going to be like basically the metropolitan statistical areas. People are going to like, got together and be like, well, we're in MSA. We might as well just like, all play together. Incorrect. Regos and MSAs have very little to do with one another at all. As you can see, this is a little bit hard to see primarily, but the funny blogs here are MSAs. And the lines, the dark lines are regos. It's Virginia. You can see we've got two, this one and this one, that are what we call congruent. So the boundaries of the metropolitan statistical area are the same as the boundaries of the regos. Everybody else is just doing their own thing. But what's going on here? We're just like, right off the end of the state. Over here is like, the rego, oh, this is, well, this is the MSA story. But you can see this MSA has broken up into three regos. This one was like, you know what, this MSA feels good, but we actually want some extra people involved. So they just expanded. So the spatial similarity is kind of interesting because it gets to the question of, we think about policy space and political space, versus the way we think about them statistically. If they're very different things, then we have a bit of an issue because we calculate a lot of things based on MSAs. We do a lot of policy based on MSAs. But what if that doesn't really mean much to the people who are doing the governing in these regions? So that's a puzzle that I'm trying to unpick a little bit. Here are all the different ways that you can be different. You can overlap, you can be contained. I'm not going to go through that. That's not really important. But we're pointing out that of 477, only 30 are, sorry, only 30 of them are congruent, and 18 of those are single-county MSAs. So they sort of didn't really have anywhere else to go. I mentioned earlier that one of the criticisms leveled against Rigo's or their ilk is that they're heavily dominated by suburban interests and the urban interests end up getting subsumed somehow. And if you think about it, why on earth would you think that? It's based on the idea that this is a one-person one-vote structure. Basically, every member would get one vote. Therefore, the city of New York would get one vote and then all of the suburbs around it would get one vote. Therefore, that's like a bazillion votes. New York never gets its way. And that this sort of under-representation of larger city centers would undermine effective regional governance. And it makes sense if you think about it that way, but who on earth would join a club like that? Why would you do that? That's crazy town. And that's actually sort of one of the reasons why we don't have one of those things here because we're extra sensitive about stuff like that. But as it turns out, nobody's actually really looked deeply into whether that's actually true. That's how decisions are made. So grad student now fully fledged Ph.D. challenged this assumption that they were governed by one-person one-vote structures and found that like some are, but most of them aren't essentially. And this really has important implications for assumptions about how effective these things are. But like also can help us learn a little bit more about collective action. Like you're not gonna join a club if you only get one vote and you're the most powerful one. You're gonna need, you know, so this allows us as actually like a nice little lab to start thinking about theories of collective action. And we're gonna do that. I'm not gonna explain this. He made an index. Essentially the deal is that he looked at the ways you can think about distributing power and influence in decision-making bodies on like two axes. One is membership and the other is proportionality. So one is, for instance, you're in New York. Okay, you get seven board members and everybody else gets one. There. Everyone still gets one vote. You kind of like level the scales a little bit. So that's trying to sort things out through a membership profile. Another one is distributing votes. One could be like, you have seven people and each one of you gets two votes. This is starting to get complicated, right? But like this is how different structures have evolved in order to balance power a little bit more between multiple competing suburban interests and the more populous kind of centers of gravity within metro regions. And they get super duper complicated. Parts of Chicago land have like three jurisdictions split one little vote. They're all like sort of like, I guess, huddle around the table and like have to figure out what they're going to vote between the three of them. Places like Sacramento and Detroit, those regions have dual testing type things. So they have like multiple layers of voting that happens and it's super complicated or might not be blown. But like the long story short is that these are not one person, one vote structures for the most part. Some of them are. They're very sophisticated and a lot of thought has been put into how you balance that power within these organizations. There you go, ergo, sorry, therefore an ergo. You know what I should point at? There you go. You can't just sort of dismiss them at a stroke. Maybe they're ineffective, we don't know. Okay, what's next? We're wrapping up. Are ergos affected? You know, it turns out that after all of that I haven't answered any questions or really you countered effectively some of these critiques that say these things aren't effective. We don't know. We just laid the groundwork so that we can start finding out whether they're effective. Our argument is that there are 477 of them. They cannot all be duds. There has to be some that are doing things right. There have to be some that are doing really super interesting things. Maybe there are some that are crazy dysfunctional and we do know of some of those. We need to learn about what's going on with that. What makes them effective? What makes them dysfunctional? Why? Why? Just why? We have a long road ahead of us in doing that, but we think we have a good foundation to start with. Are there ergos in other places other than America? I mentioned that, we were starting to think about what are these edge cases? Do they fit? Do they not fit? A lot of that is because we've been talking to people in other countries who are like, well, I have this. Is it a rego? We're like, that's sort of different. We're grappling with that. Are there ergos in other places? This is something that's portable. What is the relationship between ergos and other types of coverheads? Organizations. As I mentioned, we only pick the largest of the things that fulfill the first board criteria of our rego rubric, and that means that there are a whole bunch of other organizations out there that are like rego-like, but just not as big. We don't have an exhaustive list of those. We know we're missing a bunch, but we're in the process of trying to learn a little bit more about those organizations, how they interact with these bigger organizations, and also the other thing that we found were regions where there's only an MPO. Here, for instance. Where there's only an MPO, why is that happening? And so we have a lot of questions about that. How do I do regos change over time? They've been around for a long time, but they change. Their boundaries change. Their rules change. Things that they do change. Their governance structures change. So we're interested in that. What's the rule of non-governmental and non-traditional actors? As I mentioned, only 51% of the members have to be municipal governments or local authorities in order to qualify as a rego. That leaves a lot of other things. So what else is there? Sometimes they're businesses, sometimes they're chambers of commerce. Universities are often represented in some places. Military bases. First Nations. Native American governing structures are also on there. So we want to learn a little bit more about what the governance is of these types of actors on the decision-making process. Does it make it a little bit easier when there are some grown-ups in the room that are not fighting and squabbling over things? Maybe it doesn't. Who knows? What about Regents and Toto and our regos? What happened? Why not? Who knows? We're going to find out. So we have a lot of plans. We, as in myself and Dave Miller, we are rego maniacs and we study regos. These are our coordinates. So definitely check out our website, which is a little bit of a hot mess right now, but we'll get under control. Email me at regos.it.edu if you're interested. We're in the process of putting together some NSF research and network bids, hopefully, to try and build a network of scholars who are interested in this across the country to learn more about regos, get some more localized expertise, and start building this empirical knowledge. So that's a thing that we're always looking for if people are interested in that sort of thing, to come on board. We have no money yet. We may have money one day. We also have done a series of podcasts on regos. So if this was just wetting your appetite, don't worry, there's more. Two more podcasts will be posted, hopefully by end of day, maybe even later in the week. Who knows? Featuring, the first one is me and Dave just rapping about regos. The second pair of podcasts, again, as I mentioned, are where I interview five different executive directors from regos around the country, and they had super fascinating things to say about what their organizations do, but most critically, how they see their role. And it sort of twists your perception of why these things are important completely around. It's very, very cool. Last thing. Whoops. Just have to mention. To mention this, regos are one of my hustles. I've got another hustle here. It's the LDOT project, which instead of the L train disruption in New York City, infrastructure's my jam. And if you're not into regos, but you're into trains, call me maybe. I mean, don't call me, but get in touch. The end. I'll go back to this. I have two quick questions for you. One, I'm curious how your group dealt with public authority, because I would consider something like the Port Authority of the Port Authority to be very dirty. I would consider that to be a regional government entity because it, you know, and then secondly, I'm curious to hear more about the legal authority and the taxing authority that the regos you look at have and how you think that changes their legitimacy or their role and if it's case-specific or not. The second one was a tough one. The first one was an easy one. Fails on membership. The Port Authority is a by-state organization. It doesn't have representation from the city of New York or any municipal governments. And so we are focused on organizations that are purely, the members are local authorities. So a state can be a member, but it has to be at least 51% local governments, counties, cities, townships, et cetera. And so Port Authority, no bueno. But we struggled with that too initially, especially since I was sitting in New York and those guys were in Pittsburgh and we did all this research for years and I was like, well, how do we deal with all this? And there are a bunch of things in the New York region actually that are rego almost, but they fail on various reasons. So that's the answer to that one. Second one is taxing authority, legal authority, right? The really short answer is that we didn't initially look at that. So that wasn't something that was in our first sweep of data and that now that we're starting to refine what kind of data we're collecting, we're kind of in a like, hmm, how do we, what do we do with this? Because some do, because they are service providers, collect user fees or they, very few of them tax. Taxing is not a thing that these things do usually. But there are a couple of edge cases where we're like, does that make them a government? Does that now make them not a rego where it's a voluntary association of governments and this is more of a like, real deal government. And I'll tell you the interesting case where this came up was, I'm Canadian so I've like, initially I always sort of like, think about this through a Canadian lens as well. The Greater Vancouver Regional District, which is now called Metro Vancouver, is something that we were looking at as like, is this a rego? And in fact Dave and I are still trying to figure it out. Like he's like, yes, this is a rego it's a government. We go government. So this is again, a really wide here. It's not always easy to figure these things out and we're in the process of hammering it out and trying to figure out what that means. First pass, it didn't really matter. Second pass, it's going to matter as we like hone this out. Can you in that same spirit back to those five, your initial criteria for establishing? Yeah. Why do you make some decisions? Why classify regos this way? Some kind of asking if you were looking at toward, I know you're just trying to sort of establish terms, but why did you decide, for example, not to set things up such that you could look at things like the state leadership? What was important about the local? Things like that, in case there's a way to generalize sort of like, there is quite a long chapter of that. I'll go into it just briefly. One of the things, because we had to start from somewhere, again, the short answer is like when you're doing research, you kind of like go with what you know. I've always studied inter-jurisdictional cooperation, so I was only really interested in things that were local governments. Dave was a little bit more flexible and he's a public admin guy. So he was coming from the ACIR reports American Commission on Intergovernmental Relations did a series of reports starting in like the late 50s about this exact problem. How do you coordinate across your signal boundaries? And they came up with a term called Voluntary Metropolitan Councils which was one of the things that they kind of held up as like, if we could do this, this would be amazing. And looking back at that from today, we're sort of like, wow, that's what everyone wants regional governance to look like in the United States. Like how close did we get to that essentially? And so we used that their criteria a little bit as a model and so their focus was that's where we got the we justified that based on this sort of framework that they established. They were looking at local governments, local authorities. They're also where we got the scale thing. They thought there was only one of these things per region, otherwise you were doing it wrong. So that's one way we used to justify the scale one as well. Legitimacy was a way to separate the organizations with this credibility. Like they're not just little clubs of people with similar interests. Like in order to be the designated organization for or deliver some sort of policy agenda you had to be seen as kind of inclusive and like the right size and scale. And so this was sort of a proxy for us of like just like a test a sniff test of like whether you know whether that was right and we thought a lot more things would be cut based on that. Yeah, so I think I could go through all of them, but they're like they all had roots in various literatures and various but it was a little bit more, it was somehow especially in that one criteria which you really drew as a base with the ACRR report, yeah. Crafted around something that everybody said it didn't work that you thought kind of might and could but that's one way of doing it as opposed to I don't know, we're sort of in the New York Center but as opposed to saying what we know there are a ton of out here are these types of things that might be bigger or that might have less legitimacy but more prevalence or something, you know. So it seems like it was channeled toward what we think this is here and it probably works better if it is there that people are saying as opposed to this is what there is and here's how it works. Well, okay, so it's like again, scholarship is messy, right? Like you never come at it from one perspective, right? Like we've been in the world a long time researching regional governance and like here and there, right? So we knew they existed so it wasn't like but we didn't think that there were that many of them. Right, we thought it was just going to be a metropolitan phenomenon we thought it was just going to be like maybe we would be lucky if we found a hundred in the largest metro regions in the country. When we used this Christ so we started with this is going to be local authorities working together across jurisdictional boundaries for collective aims like not a top-down state thing this is what like the our vision of regional governance was based on like lots of theoretical literature and lots of sort of this Pelican men stuff and then we went we sort of constructed this knowing that we would find some and we're astonished at how many we found so I think that you know if we went looking for court authorities we would have a much smaller list and that's like a different animal. Fun fact I'm writing a book about the court authority as well so I can talk to you about that my totally different animal though that kind of organization I'm kind of curious about the organizations that kind of nearly meet these criteria and I'm curious if there's an argument for why that their role in regional policy is not as efficient or as kind of strong as the other and also if there's an incentive for them to change their structure to become a rego yeah first answer is okay I want to like push back a little bit on one of the things you said the fact that an organization doesn't fulfill those five criteria and isn't a rego doesn't mean it's not significant in fact so one of the things the arguments that we make is like yes we named the biggest one a rego that doesn't mean it's the most effective it doesn't mean it's the most significant it doesn't mean that anyone cares about it the smaller organization may in fact be more important but we had to draw a line somewhere we had to like apply it evenly and rigorously across the country and that was the hill we chose to die on and our next step is going to be to try and figure out what the relationship is between those regos and what we just call intergovernmental organizations but I think we're going to have to rename because that's confusing and whatever and so lots to learn there places where this happens a lot in Pennsylvania there's just like a bazillion intergovernmental organizations there and a small handful of regos but those IGOs are probably pretty important so again our goal was to establish like a conceptual lingua franca something that we could start doing research with in as comparative way as we could comparable ways we could and it's not perfect but it's we hope that people will take this critique it and refine it do better and move this agenda forward because I think the issue is we don't want people to stop thinking about regionalism and want to learn more about it and by yanking these organizations out of the darkness we can hopefully get more people interested your second question was remind me incentive well yeah so regos remember that's just like a word we made up yeah it's a conceptual bucket that some organizations are psyched to be in honestly like we've been going to a lot of the national association of regional councils the national association of development organizations there's like the southwestern economic development districts association there are lots of these practitioners or psyched that someone's talking about them I haven't met anyone yet who is like we're not a rego but we'd love to be a rego what we have to do because I don't really get you anything just get on this list and we'll study you but we're hoping though like long term that this starts to gain some traction in policy circles in which case being thought of as a rego might have some some policy advantages but more than anything I think we're not thinking like oh people are going to make policies for regos but that state and federal governments are going to start to recognize that governing regions is a serious thing and that there are organizations there with capacity and maybe you supported them more you want a smaller government? alright fine there are people who are doing this already in a lot of different places with not very many resources you can give them more resources and see what happens and as we start to unpack how effective they are what do they do, what are they good at we'll be able to make that case a little bit more effectively in which case I think the people will be like hmm maybe a rego is not so bad but who knows let me ask a little bit do you not like the federal system like do you just think do you think that is inefficient, is that what you're getting at that you're adding a level of government on top of county it exists, I mean it's not government these are 477 governments organizations that exist that are doing policy that are coordinating policies across jurisdictional boundaries some of them are providing services at a regional scale some of them aren't even getting federal money this is not a new thing so I'm just saying that when we're talking about austerity and efficiency and things like that in this current climate that's generally in a lot of ways that one of the ways one of the things that we can do is to think about supporting these governance organizations in various ways, I mean they're already getting transportation money, they're already getting social development money they're already getting housing money, they're getting all sorts of stuff but just nobody knows about they're not governments all of this is based on consensus or whatever their voting structure is and all the members have to play ball in order to make anything happen at a regional scale but they exist and they're doing stuff so they are viable policy instruments perhaps thank you mine is sufficiently low nice because 477 is blanketing most of the country when the governance structure that we never talk about never I'm shocking let alone the multiplicity of agenda areas that they're engaged in I want to talk at length about the spatial dissimilarity findings but I'm not going to because we can't be here forever I will say modifiable area unit problem in this room and then I'm going to piggyback on all of these other comments about the criteria yes because that's definitely striking a quarter of this room but I think it's because this is not a question this is a statement this is a moment it's a moment of gratitude thank you for this comment I mean on one hand I think the giving some conceptual clarity and definitional clarity to this question is what allows us is the step that allows us to see how prevalent these structures are right but I also find it's extremely useful especially on a forum like LIPS where predominantly students in the room to see the kind of research advantage of that kind of clarity like that you draw them on you have to define it somewhere but that also allows for what could be generations worth of research to follow to answer these efficacy and efficiency and effectiveness questions like what happens if you compare the videos to all of them all of them that meet criteria 1 through 4 but not 5 all of them that meet criteria 1 through 3 and 5 but not 4 and like now there's a framework for comparison that we didn't have before let alone a definition and I think that's super valuable for our students to see especially as many of them think through how to structure research super fun to do this by the way lots of people are pissed at us thank you that's quite a bit of what we know about regional just the research on regional governments because now you have to call on to question the efficacy or the appropriateness and applicability of the MSA as a statistical area because the one thing purpose is meant to serve is collect statistics and it doesn't apply right but speaking of which we now have a tool on the website too that allows you to compile any statistic that you can get for the MSA at the rego scale so you can compare them you can mess around with them so much left to be done it's super fun it's super fun and there's just a lot to be done and again I want to say this again and this is useful for students we do this with humility with a humbleness we knew that there was something out there to study we thought that it was important we built this framework is it the only way to think about it? no and people are pushing back and that's great that's what scholarship is that's what we do we throw a hand grenade into a whole 100 years of discipline and expect that you're just going to be able to do it see we're right obviously and all of you are wrong, that's not true and that's sort of one of the reasons why especially in a group of students I want to be straightforward about how this is a work in progress we drew our lines then every once in a while you get a case and you're just like what do we do with that? that's what we do that's what research is about and you have to live and die by those decisions and you can change your mind you can evolve and we're hoping that enough people engage with this will help it evolve and help us learn a lot more about these things that are out there doing really cool things really super quietly that allow us to think better about space, geography, planning about big theories about action and how people work together all of that stuff we can get at through these things that we couldn't do before so that's what I want be inspired learn about regions is anybody else? that I believe that you were mentioning that having just one vote by these faculty was maybe an issue for you but I have a question it's more about the type of project than about the sites of the studio like for example the air train that doesn't affect the servers doesn't affect places that we can come to wherever however the tap and sea breach affected totally those areas and almost almost none in New York City is more towards the small towns the whole sites of the the breach so I think that for projects it's more towards what the areas are impacting than what was very interesting point the way I would say that we like think about this is that it doesn't really matter whatever their voting structure is is the voting structure for every single decision they take whether it affects everybody or it just affects a tiny bit of the region and so we have to understand that as like structure and power relations more broadly but you're absolutely right that depending on and like it's not just project it's policy area so you can think of like alright environmental kind of concern might have a different set of interests that align than a transportation concern like where do you build a road or where do you build a bridge or like the kinds of things you want to do they're not unrelated to one another or same thing with housing like different types of interests and motivations come into play in those and so what we're super interested in is like is it easier to do collective policy and transportation or housing or these other things what are the types of areas that we're finding like really successful cooperation versus much more contentious types of relationships are there things that these organizations won't touch because they're like hot you don't want to open that can of worms so that's an excellent point and I could go on at length about how the L train is going to affect the suburbs but but I take your point right which is that there are things that are hyper localized and there are things that are much more regional and there are things that affect just one part of a region versus the whole thing and those are all things that we need to learn more about how these regions balance that and get along sometimes they do and sometimes they don't and we don't know we have no idea, not yet working on it