 Hello everybody and welcome. It's great to see all of you here today. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and I'm really pleased to see all of you with us here this afternoon for a very special event. There are a number of things that I'm expected to do as dean and then there's some things that I get to do and I have to say in that second category one of my absolute favorite things is to be able to recognize some of our distinguished faculty who bring so much to every dimension of what we do here at the Ford School and at the University and so in that vein the opportunity to introduce Elizabeth Gerber is really a true pleasure. While judging from the fact that I know a number of her family members are here, we're joined by her mother, her husband, both of her children, a number of family friends as well. Thank you very much for coming here. It's special to have you with us today. We also have a number of her colleagues and students and faculty and staff from the Ford School and the University and we're delighted to have all of you here with us as well. Well today's lecture commemorates Liz's appointment as the Jack L. Walker Jr. Professor of Public Policy and that was an honor that was awarded in fall of 2012 and as some of you know we within two years after such an appointment invite the distinguished faculty member to come and give a public lecture and that's what brings us all here together today. A collegiate professorship is awarded by the Board of Regents of the University and is one of the highest honors that the University bestows on a faculty member. Liz chose to have her chair named after her mentor Jack L. Walker Jr. who was a distinguished professor of Public Policy and Political Science and also director of the Ford School's predecessor, Ips, the Institute for Public Policy Studies. Jack passed away in 1990 but he left behind him. Excuse us for one second. Make sure there we go. Okay. People hear me. That's better. He left behind him a real legacy of integrating practical problem solving exercises into our policy courses. That was one of the things that he was particularly adept at doing and in that tradition a particularly appropriate naming for this chair. He survived by his wife Linda and his sons Max and Sam. Linda wishes she were able to be here with us today and sends her regrets but did ask me to pass on how honor she is by Liz's choice of her naming and also how proud she is of Liz and all of her accomplishments. There's a bio of Liz in your program but I really wanted to spend just a little bit of time telling you about her and some of her accomplishments. Well as many of you know she earned her doctorate degree right here at the University of Michigan and then she left to spend 10 years on the faculty of the Political Science Department at the University of California in San Diego. Well we were very fortunate to recruit her here back to Michigan in 2001 as the founding director of the Center of Local State and Urban Policy finally known as close up and that center is now vibrant and nationally recognized as a center that focuses on those very important issues. Her research addresses a number of critical challenging issues related to regional governance, intergovernmental cooperation, how to deepen the capacities of local governments and how to design and implement policies that would enhance transportation and economic development more generally. Her very influential scholarship was recognized in 2012 by her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and that is a true honor as well. Well you'll hear more about the insights from her research as part of her public lecture and I know that we're in for quite a treat today not just because of the substance that I'm sure that talk will include but also because she is a very clear and cogent presenter as you will soon see. Liz is an exemplary teacher who's courses have often made the Ford School's honor roll and so we have on many many occasions recognized her in that way as well. The Ford School's educational programs have benefited from her leadership in a variety of ways and I just wanted to highlight one of the initiatives that has a particular Liz stamp on it and that is our applied policy seminar. The APS as we seem like we have a lot of acronyms here it was initially started in 1997 but as part of a curricular review we did a few years ago Liz and a number of her colleagues really reinvented that course which now enables groups of MPP students to work on projects under faculty supervision often Liz's supervision with real world clients and that course is now viewed as a capstone and is often one of the highlights of our master's program curriculum. In fact very recently a team of the students presented before the state of Michigan House Commerce Committee to testify on a house bill that would allow equity crowdfunding in Michigan and their success really is an example a testament to her leadership as an instructor and the client is here. Thank you so much for joining us it's great to have you here and to her concern and focus on ways to reach out and benefit not only local communities but engaging our students in those activities as well. Well 2014 marks the centennial for the Ford School and our next issue of our magazine State and Hill will commemorate that milestone with a timeline that tells the story of our school's first century. Well prominent throughout that history and I enjoyed the opportunity to read the final draft of that just over this past weekend but prominent in that history have been faculty who not only excel in scholarship and teaching but also understand the value of engaging with and engaging our students with policy practitioners. That list includes Thomas Reed in the 1920s, Jack Walker in the 1970s, Ned Gramlich in the 1990s and many others but certainly on that list I would include Elizabeth Gerber and that's something that we're very proud of as well. So I'd like to remind our audience that there will be an informal Q&A session after her remarks. If you have a question please wait for one of our volunteers to bring you a microphone to make sure that everybody is able to hear your question. If you're watching online you can tweet in your questions to us please use the hashtag policy talks and we'll have a volunteer who will read the question to you. In just a moment I will turn the podium over to Liz but first and given her very active engagement in public policy won't come as any surprise to you that she has many many friends in Michigan State and local government. One of those friends is Michigan State Senator Rebecca Warren. Well Senator Warren sends her regret she's very sorry she's not able to be here today but she also sends a tribute and there's a portion of that tribute that I would like to read. Actually and I will be presenting this to Liz in just a moment so I'd like to read a portion of the tribute to you. It says let it be known that it is with the greatest pleasure that we join the family friends and colleagues of Dr. Elizabeth Gerber in extending warm wishes as she is honored for the appointment as the Jack L. Walker Jr. Professor of Public Policy. We are proud to recognize the important role Dr. Gerber has played both at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and in the scholarly study of public policy and in special tribute therefore this document is signed and dedicated to congratulate Dr. Elizabeth Gerber for her outstanding service to the study of public policy and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. We wish her well as she continues her valuable research and instruction and the tribute is signed by Senator Warren State Representative Jeff Irwin and Governor Rick Snyder. Awesome. So in a moment I will turn the floor over to the Jack L. Walker Professor of Public Policy Elizabeth Gerber but first I would invite her to come and we'd like a photograph. A little snafu on the way. Excuse me. Thank you. Can I take it down there? Please. Leave the podium to you. Okay. Thank you. Wow I think I'll just go home. Thank you Susan for that incredibly gracious and generous introduction and thank you everyone of you for coming today. I'm totally honored. A little nervous but very excited to be able to talk with all of you today about some of the research that I do and to share with you different aspects of that research and some of my thinking on some topics that I hope you will all find of interest today. Just to add one sort of personal thought on the Jack Walker chair and why I chose Jack Walker to honor with the naming of this chair. As Susan mentioned I was a graduate student here at the University of Michigan in the early 1980s and had the great fortune of working not only with Jack but also with several other of my mentors who are here today with John Jackson with Rick Hall and I don't see Paul but Paul Carant was also one of my mentors and advisors in graduate school and all of them made an important impact on me and my intellectual development. Jack in particular influenced me in both professional and personal ways. Professionally he helped me understand the importance of the representation of interest groups in the American system both organized and unorganized and the many barriers and challenges that groups face in gaining representation in our political system. Jack dedicated his life to that question and was really seen as a pioneer in the study of interest groups in American politics and my interest in those issues has continued throughout my career as well. Jack was also an incredible mentor and he was incredibly generous personally and professionally. As a first-year graduate student he made me feel like a valued colleague and really gave me the confidence to do what I do. Stand up here and talk to folks like you and go out there and put my ideas down on paper and put them out in the world and take whatever comes at me. I attribute a lot of that not just to Jack of course there are many other people here who have helped me and influenced me but in thinking about the naming of this chair that was a really important consideration and I was so delighted and honored to be able to name this professorship after Jack Walker. With introduction let's go. All right so let me see if I got this right. Okay so you all came because well because of me but you thought that you were going to come in here about this the topic which is metropolitan areas regionalism and the politics of intergovernmental cooperation but that's a little you know dull. So let's spice it up a little and talk about something that we can all kind of get our hands around which of course is really what the big title is about but let's put it in slightly more interesting and lively terms I don't want my kids to fall asleep you know before I at least get to the meat of the of the question. So what I'd like to talk about is a more concrete question which is metropolitan Detroit and collaboration in the Metro Detroit region. The work that I've done over the last 10 or so years I think help us inform our answer to this question and help us think about it in a more systematic way. So let's start thinking about Detroit and then we can come back out to the bigger question a little bit later and just in case you're wondering the answers yes they can but it's a little more complicated than that so let's talk about it. All right so metropolitan Detroit everybody here has I think some sense in different ways of the region of the metropolitan Detroit region and no doubt if you've known anything about the region you've heard about its dysfunction that as a region Metro Detroit doesn't work very well. It's one of the most segregated regions by both race and class in the country and it's exemplified by the stark disparities throughout the region where we have rich and poor, haves and have nots, white and black, new and old and so on and that has led to all sorts of public policy problems at a regional level. So I think I've got a light here I do. We have a terribly underfunded transportation system. We've got a water system across the region that is also underfunded and in sort of disarray right now as Detroit tries to figure out what to do with that system. We've got does anybody know which building this is? This is the Hudson building downtown. Gutting out of the retail sector in the downtown and a movement out to the suburbs of a lot of that business and people are typically are generally pessimistic about the region and about its prospects and there are a lot of explanations for why that might be the case. A lot of people point to these characters. The county executives of Wayne County and Oakland County are only two of many who are blamed for some of the personality politics that seem to be so divisive in the region. Famously exemplified by Brooks Patterson's recent New Yorker article that was literally titled Drop Dead Detroit. He's the executive of one of the suburban counties who said we don't need Detroit. That's not true everywhere. There are a lot of regions in the country that function well. Metropolitan areas that seem to work as regions. Some of the most famous are Portland and Minneapolis. If anybody's read anything in urban planning you've read about Minneapolis and Portland. Denver has recently been able to get its regional act together and build a big new transit system and even within the Midwest Grand Rapids Michigan has had some real successes in regionalism and Cleveland is another example that people tend to look to to think about regions that seem to be working pretty well and in fact all is not in disarray in metropolitan Detroit. There certainly have been some successes. So in 2009 Cobo Hall, I'm sorry the Cobo Center was put under the governance of a regional authority so that people interest within both the city and the metropolitan area would have some both influence over the renovation of Cobo Hall but also the governance and financing of its operations and that was seen as a real regional success for Metro Detroit. The DIA in 2012 a three county millage of property tax was passed to fund the DIA or to provide some of the funding for the DIA and then now in the Detroit bankruptcy proceedings a truly region wide effort has taken place where businesses, foundations, individuals from across the region have dedicated put up several hundred million dollars to protect the not how dirt million dollars yeah several hundred million dollars to protect the art collection at the DIA another regional effort and then of course my favorite the regional transit authority yeah which is a four county effort to create a more integrated and expanded transit system across the region so we do have some sex successes we definitely have some failures in metropolitan Detroit and the question is what explains why some metropolitan areas function well and in some circumstances and what are the motivations behind successful collaboration can we learn things from regions that are successful in collaborating that may be lessons that we can take to the Metropolitan Detroit region and think about whether communities in that region can collaborate better to their collective benefit and of course you already know the answer because I already told you it's yes but let's talk about what some of those lessons are and what we can learn for Metro Detroit from some studies all right so here's the game plan for today we're gonna talk about some general ideas about what our metropolitan areas why are they important what governance or policy challenges did they present why are we talking about metropolitan areas anyway all right I'm not talking about cities I'm talking about this other thing I haven't even told you what it is really I'll get to that in a second all right then I'm gonna offer a view of regionalism that is distinctly political right I'm a political scientist many of you are political scientists not everybody but I know some of you are and much of the work on regionalism has ignored the political aspects the political considerations that go into decisions by regional actors about whether or not to collaborate and so what I'm gonna do is put forward some ideas that bring politics right to the forefront of a theory of regionalism and this is stuff that I've been working on for for a number of years I'm then gonna talk about a number of actual studies that I and some of my colleagues have undertaken that illustrate the logic of this view of regionalism in different settings and situations and then we'll come back to Detroit and think about what did we learn about regionalism and collaboration in general all right everybody with me nobody asleep yet all right so let's start with this part okay so what are metropolitan areas well metropolitan areas are geographic regions and they're defined not by the boundaries on a map necessarily but by the activity that goes on within them okay so a metropolitan area is an area that has a high degree of economic and social integration okay so they're different than cities where cities we can all agree to exactly what the boundary is of Ann Arbor there's a map and it says exactly what that boundary is and for metropolitan areas it's socially and economically defined right the boundaries are fluid and context specific and I'll show you some ideas about that in a minute but you and I may disagree about what the boundaries of metropolitan Detroit or the Ann Arbor region metropolitan Ann Arbor or Metro Chicago and so on and so forth there's no there's no clear definition because it matters what matters depends on what you care about what is the problem what is the interaction what is the thing that that region is relevant for and so so that's that becomes tricky in terms of governance for a lot of reasons I'll talk about that in a moment the US Census Bureau and the Office of Management and Budget put forward definitions of metropolitan areas that are used for statistical purposes so that's one place to start we can say that but even there it's more complicated than that so the Census Bureau has a number of different definitions of what metropolitan type areas are they've got metropolitan areas and micropolitan areas and consolidated metro areas and all sorts of different permutations and really that's because people care about different things when they want to study a metropolitan area and so it's not a one-size-fits-all concept and so you don't have a one-size-fits-all definition it is it is the case that I'll talk a little bit more about what some of those definitions look like but there are other definitions as well not everybody agrees with the census definitions so for example if I have a business and I want to claim that my distribution area is a metropolitan area it's up to me to decide what the actual boundaries are and what the definition is it's context specific and so for just taking the metropolitan Detroit region again as an example this is the six county MSA metropolitan statistical area that the census currently uses and so it contains St. Clair Lapeer Livingston I'm gonna get I'm not gonna get all these Oakland McComb and Wayne counties all right so if you look up in the census what's the Metropolitan Detroit MSA this is what it tells you however it also will give you the consolidated metropolitan area again this is census definition and that adds three more counties Monroe, Washtenaw and Genesee all right and so for other purposes that might be suppose you're interested in labor markets people move between all of those counties and so that might be a definition that you'd be interested in this is a seven county this is the transportation region that the federal government uses when it allocates the federal highway fund dollars to Metropolitan Detroit it goes to this seven county region this is the four county regional transit authority Metropolitan Detroit region this is this is where transit money not transportation money because that goes to the seven county I think you're getting my idea here this is the five county metropolitan area that's relevant to the Metro Parks this is the five county Metro Parks region and they call themselves Metro Detroit and then this is Wayne Oakland McComb which probably is the one that's most natural for most people to say okay so what that tells us is sorry jump the jump the page so so there's no one definition and there shouldn't be it depends on what the purpose is okay so fluid boundaries unclear definitions they matter metro areas matter so metropolitan areas broadly defined and here I'm using MSAs which is the census definition which I mentioned before and again an MSA is an urban core of at least 50,000 people and then the surrounding counties that make up its integrated labor and economic market 81% of the U.S. population lives within a metropolitan area that's quite a lot so most people live in metro areas it's where people live this is a graph of where people live and work all right and the point of this graph is that 74% of American adults over the age of 16 live and work in the same metropolitan area 19% live outside of an MSA now the numbers are a little different here because this is people over 16 and the 81% that I gave you before it was all people but of workers you have 19% who live outside of an MSA 74% live and work in the same MSA and only 8% live and work in different MSAs so people live and work in the same regions and MSAs metro areas are responsible for a huge amount of output of economic activity over a third of all economic activity is generated from the top 10 largest MSAs there are about 300 not about there are 366 MSAs currently and the top 10 of those account for 34% of all of the output in the country so it's MSN metropolitan areas are where people live there were people work and they're where most of the economic activity in our country is generated so they're important they're also they also create very difficult governance problems and when I for those of you who aren't policy people or political scientists by governance problems I mean that the formation and implementation of policy of public policies within a region and it's not just governmental policy that I'm talking about but policy broadly defined when we talk about governance we mean a broader range of policies and activities and actors the fluid boundaries make it difficult to govern to do stuff within a metropolitan area because it's not clear whose job it is to do that work it's not like a city where you have a boundary and you've got a city council member and it's clear who the actors are if the boundaries are fluid if you just decide well I'm talking about transportation so this is the region that I care about it's not at all obvious who the governors are who the who the actors are that should and that have the authority to do governance over that metropolitan area so that's one big problem a second is that within these areas these larger metropolitan areas authority tends to be highly fragmented so here's the seven county metropolitan Detroit region again and each of the polygons each of the shapes is a separate local government right now of course I don't have my notes oh no I do have my notes 239 in total within the seven county region so about four and a half million people live there and there are two almost 240 governments all of which have taxation powers land use powers they can pass all sorts of laws regulations taxes do all sorts of stuff okay and they all have these powers and they're all doing all of these things in an uncoordinated way for the most part okay so all of these decision-makers are all battling to make laws that affect the people that live within these regions and needless to say often they conflict often they overlap often there's a lot of inefficiency that comes from this in fact there are all sorts of inefficiencies that come from this right and so let me talk about three of these I'm going to put my economics hat on because this is stuff that economists think about more often than political scientists but let me talk a little bit about economic inefficiency so we think about when we think about governing it's not all about efficiency we don't only care about getting the most output out of an input but we care something sometimes about that right we don't want to be highly inefficient because then we're wasting resources if we can get the same outcome more efficiently then there's more stuff to go around right if you're making policy about you know childcare for example you're gonna do pre-k education and you have a fixed amount of money and there are two different ways that you can get do that to get the same outcome you want to do the one that uses the less resources that it's more efficient so that you have those resources to do something else so it economic inefficiency is problematic because it means you're wasting resource scarce public resources that you could use on some other purposes so we care at least a little some of us care a lot about economic inefficiency and there are three main kinds of economic inefficiency that regions present do both to the fluid boundaries and to the fragmented authority one of them and so these I'm gonna go through each of these on the net on the next couple of slides okay so the first is this concept of economies of scale economies economies of scale means that you can do the same thing more efficiently if you do it over a larger in this context over a larger geography a larger set of people right so one of the problems with metropolitan areas is you've got this fragmented authority you've got lots of governments all doing the same things and you may be able to gain economies you may be able to gain economic efficiency by doing those policies over a larger scale rather than lots of small-scale operations separately so here's an example of a really expensive fire truck it is a 100-foot aerial ladder truck and they cost about eight or nine hundred thousand dollars new and as far as I can tell about three or four hundred thousand dollars used so I was reading about something and I came across a news thing that the borough of Montvale New Jersey had just bought one of these beauties brand new for their population of seventy eight thousand people turns out they don't have a single building that's actually a hundred feet high for the whole thing and they've only got you know two thousand structures total in the whole borough clearly if they were to go in cooperatively with a neighbor and expand the region that this aerial truck would be responsible for it would be cheaper for them right maybe they could only pay half of the eight hundred thousand dollars or if they went in together with four units of government maybe they'd only pay a quarter of it but they they bought the whole thing themselves for this little borough okay so by not acting regionally by acting strictly locally in this case by not dealing with the fragmented authority they wasted a lot of money they could have gotten the same protection but for a lot less money that's the notion of economies of scale and within a region within regional government government within a regional governance problem within a metropolitan area those problems may be very large there may be lots of opportunities for capturing economies of scale but due to the fragmented authority within the region it's hard to get there so it's an economic efficiency inefficiency for leaving all that money on the table for not collaborating and going it alone all right the second kind of inefficiency that we're going to talk about is something we call negative externalities and by negative externalities we mean that the stuff that one government does has costs or has impact negative impacts for another unit but that other unit of government has no power to affect what the offending government does so these are two jurisdictions this is one city it's actually a township and this is another one and this road is the boundary between them you see that they've made very different decisions about how to develop so I would say that this guy who lives on this farm this family here has suffered some costs from this development across the street for example the road to the grocery store is probably going to be a little more crowded because there are a whole lot of people over here to say nothing of the pastoral landscape that they no longer have to say nothing of the pollution and strain on services and so on and so forth so all sorts of stuff going on here impacting folks over here and these folks are receiving these externalities and have no way to force them on the other side to not do the things that are imposing costs on this side and so again another form of economic inefficiency caused by fragmented authority within a metropolitan area that if individual local governments are just behaving by themselves there's no way to deal with that okay there are ways to deal with that if they begin to collaborate but there's no way to deal with that in the absence of collaboration and then finally let's talk about positive externalities alright so here's a this is a case where obviously this boundary between this jurisdiction and this jurisdiction if these two neighbors were to collaborate everybody would be better off right so people here could get here and people here could get here and the whole system works better through collaboration so the thing that doesn't happen when you don't have collaboration is that opportunities to create additional benefits from each side from collaboration are left again on the table you don't get coordination and therefore you don't get the train being able to go between the two jurisdictions and people from both side getting additional benefits okay so those are the three forms of if inefficiencies that exist within metropolitan areas due to fragmented authority and due to fluid boundaries that in the absence of some kind of collaboration mean that you have more inefficiency you have less efficient governance you have less efficient provision of governmental policy and so regionalism or intergovernmental collaboration I'm going to use those two terms interchangeably is a solution to some of these problems it's a way of either internalizing oops internalizing those externalities so finding a way that if one unit is creating negative externalities for another that they can collaborate and figure out a way for that not to happen or if they're not producing positive externalities they can collaborate and figure out a way to get more of those benefits or if there are economies of scale to be captured they can get together and capture those things the problem is that what has to happen is in the absence of regional governance I as a decision-maker in a given local government get to make my own decisions that's the whole point it's a local I'm a I'm an autonomous government and I get to do what I do within you know some broader legal framework and if I decide to engage in regional governance if I decide to collaborate with other local governments within my region I'm giving up some of that authority who likes to do that Marvin likes to give up authority but he's probably the only person in the room certainly elected officials don't like to give up authority and certainly a lot of residents don't like their elected officials to give up authority they want local control right so so that's the big tension you know it's going that way so and then again as I mentioned earlier you know a lot of people who have talked about regionalism and regional governance do it in terms of economic efficiency I'm going to add to that this notion also of political benefits and political costs so it's not in my view it's not just about thinking about are there economic benefits to be had and what are the economic costs but in order to understand regional governance and that motivations that actors have and the potential for greater regional governance we have to think about these political costs and benefits as well right so let's do that so in this view of regionalism and in particular my theory of the politics of regionalism it's useful to think about local government actors they're the main decision makers who are responsible to both local interests and regional interests and so in political science we think of these as two level games where you've got a game going on at one level but there are also actors at another level that those decision makers have to engage with and interact with and those actors have to then weigh the economic and political benefits of cooperation against the political costs that they face they are political actors sometimes elected officials sometimes appointed officials but they act within a political system and so they have to account for the political costs and benefits of the things they do otherwise they don't get reelected plain and simple and so it's not cynical it's not corrupt it's not that it's just what it is it's a system of government where political actors have to pay attention to their constituents and those constituents are primarily at a local level but they may also have people that they need to pay attention to at other levels and the big problem that they face comes back to this question that I mentioned earlier about giving up some authority there's necessarily redistribution involved right so think about when you're if I'm a local government actor and I'm making decisions about how to do public policy in my local government I'm only thinking about my local government so I get money from taxes and other revenues I spend money on services and so on and they benefit the people who live in my region if I'm going to collaborate with other governments I need to think about that those resources benefiting somebody else all right and so the politics of that can be very difficult all right so very briefly let's think about for a minute who are what are the political benefits and how should we think of them when we want to bring politics into a study of regionalism the first we need to think about who are the actors and as I said often these actors are elected officials sometimes they're appointed officials or staff and they may be other actors too regular citizens may and but may be involved in regional decision-making we need to think about what are their goals we need to think about what are their incentives and we need to think about to whom are they accountable if I'm going to engage in collaboration at a regional level with my neighbors not within my jurisdiction but within other jurisdictions these are all the things I need to think about in terms of what am I going to get out of it as a decision maker I also have to think about the cost so what am I giving up what am I redistributing in this transaction in this regional interaction is it authority is it money is it other resources what are the preferences and characteristics of the other actors am I giving stuff to people who have in my sharing with people who have similar preferences to my own or other different preferences and interests and if I do that what are the likely punishments am I likely to not be reelected am I likely to be challenged in a primary am I likely to be rewarded and are my constituents going to appreciate that I have improved my local unit and brought more resources or brought better policy in or are they going to punish me all right so let me talk let me this is all pretty abstract right now let me talk about some actual empirical examples some data from a number of studies that shed some light on this prior question of what are the conditions under which local government actors are likely to collaborate how do we get collaboration at a regional level to help overcome some of these different economic efficiencies that I just described all right so let me first talk about an example in the area of municipal service sharing this is the lovely new building of the downtown Ann Arbor City Hall and I'm going to talk a little bit about a study about municipal service sharing that was published in 2009 now the the when we talk about municipal service sharing this is an example of collaboration which is intended to capture economies of scale all right so we talked about that with the fire truck we talked about municipal service sharing the goal of that activity that form of collaboration is for two or more units of local government to get together and combine their efforts to provide a single set of services so this is very common in the areas for example of fire which I showed you where two local governments decide to combine their fire services and a number of other types of collaboration as well the key insight to this study is that the kinds of collaboration that we see taking place very depending on what's the service that the government is trying to provide so if I have the I'm sorry jumped ahead the study is based on a survey that was done in 2005 by the Citizens Research Council that asked that surveyed all of the local governments in Michigan they got responses from about two-thirds of them and asked them what kinds of services do you collaborate on with other governments and what kinds of collaborative arrangements do you have are you collaborating with your neighbors we call that horizontal collaboration because it's collaborating with governments at the same level of government or are you collaborating say with the county which is at a higher level of government within the political system we call that vertical because it's you know higher level compared to horizontal and then also whether they self-provide services whether they're not collaborating at all and one thing that we thought the the key insight from that study is that cities are most likely to self-provide very labor-intensive services so they have people on staff who are doing things like purchasing and HR and so on and those are the services that tend to be provided in-house we have quite a lot of collaboration with neighbors when their economies of scale to be captured and then we also identified this other concept which is economies of skill and this is where a service requires a good deal of expertise and so things like crime labs and animal control and so on it doesn't make any sense for every local government to have their own crime lab largely because the expertise is very expensive and that tends to be provided by the state and so you see a lot of collaboration with the state or with the county for those to capture those economies of skill here's a little excerpt from some of the data the first column looks at the top five services mentioned as being self- provided by Michigan local governments the middle column which includes things like fire and library and hazardous materials and water and sewer treatment those all are examples where we see a lot of horizontal cooperation with their neighbors and then in the last column we've got vertical collaboration or cooperation where these are sort of high skilled high expertise areas and you see a lot of reported collaboration with either the county or the state another insight though that's very important here is that characteristics of the municipality and its partners don't matter very much so you've got rich and poor you've got large and small you've got rural and urban all different sorts of communities are collaborating to capture these economies of scale and economies of skill we'll see in a moment that that's not true for some of the other forms of collaboration a small exception is that larger wealthier cities are a little bit more likely to engage in horizontal collaboration and charter townships which are a certain kind of government which are sort of lean do a lot more collaboration particularly with their counties and then the final insight from this study is that collaboration is much more actually two of them collaboration is much more likely on new services so if you don't have to give up something that you're already doing if you're providing a service it's hard to give it up but if two places decide hey we should have a library it's a lot easier to do that together and capture those economies and the final insight which I think is really important is that not all service sharing arrangements produce cost savings so a lot of the stuff that we see communities doing actually end up costing more in total but it's better service all right so buying that fire truck nobody had to buy the fire truck but they do and if they do it collaboratively it's actually more cost than the zero for not buying it but it's less than if they had gone alone so it's not clear that they're saving any money there but they're getting better service and it's important to understand when you're thinking about can collaboration help Metro Detroit communities it's not a panacea for budget woes in fact often collaboration doesn't save money but it may give you better service all right and then I want to talk about one other study on municipal service sharing with my colleague Carolyn low who's sitting here thank you Carolyn hi on a paper that is about to come out in the Journal of Urban Affairs this is also looking at collaboration to try to achieve economies of scale and skill based on a 2010 Michigan public policy survey which was conducted by close-up here in the Ford School it's a survey of local government officials throughout the state it's done twice a year and on the 2010 MPPS survey they asked respondents about the kinds of collaboration that they did and with whom who their partners were and what we want to know is are there spatial patterns to that in addition to the kinds of factors that I mentioned earlier and so he made these really cool maps this is called a hotspot analysis where it shows clusters of collaboration that are above what you would expect from the baseline across the state so in other words if you say well across the state you've got some level of collaboration where you see red you see more than you would expect and where you see blue you see less than what you would expect and interestingly Metro Detroit has quite a lot of blue and Arbor itself has a bit of red there's some collaboration going on here and then areas like Grand Rapids, Lansing, this must be I don't know, Carolyn do you know which one that one is? I don't know. Now Kalamazoo is a little further over it's a cluster of townships maybe I'm not sure anyway read the paper if you if you want to know exactly where they are but anyway so we made these crazy maps and the key insight that I think we found is that where you have collaboration in one area you get it in lots of areas and so it seems to be sort of contagious that it's not just you know this place collaborates on land use and this place collaborates on purchasing and this place collaborates on something else you get clusters not only within the cities that are collaborating but in all the stuff that they do so collaboration tends to breed collaboration the absence of collaboration also seems to be interesting I think you figure out what jerks your neighbors are in some places and decide not to work with them anymore I'm not not sure how else to describe it but you do find that when you have an absence of collaboration is kind of across the board okay so let me just let me just pause for a second so just to be sure that you understand where I'm going and then I remind myself where I'm going municipal service sharing is one form of collaboration that's intended to to address one type of economic inefficiency that being economies of scale and so the studies that I just talked about our studies to try to understand when does that take place what are the characteristics of the communities that engage in that kind of collaboration and and why did and that gives us some insight into why did they do it now I'm going to switch gears and talk about a couple of studies that have to do with a different kind of economic inefficiency this is the train tracks basically that's a really complicated set of train tracks this is dealing with positive externalities and it's the area of regional transportation policy talk about a study that I did a couple years ago with my colleague Clark Gibson and again the goal of the policy that we're looking at the regional transportation policy is to try to harness some of the positive externalities that would be created by better coordination within a metro area we we conducted a analysis of the transportation improvement plans which are the actual spending plans that each region they're called metropolitan planning organizations that's the seven county one that I showed you way back when each metropolitan area has a designated metropolitan planning organization MPO and each of those has their spending plan so if you look at what's actually being spent you can see how are those dollars being allocated how much regionalism how much collaboration is taking place within that decision-making body in that region and what we looked at is to what extent did the decision-makers incentives affect how regional the spending is versus how local the spending is regional spending is an indication of regionalism you're spending on regional projects rather than strictly local projects and the key insight from that study is that when you look across MPOs they're very different in terms of who makes the decisions in some places like Metro Detroit it's elected officials who sit on the SEMCOG board on the MPO's board in a lot of other places it's appointed officials it's transportation planners like Sarah it's professionals in the transportation world engineers and so on who have a different view who aren't necessarily the elected officials from the jurisdictions that it's covering but they have a greater regional orientation and the date the evidence is very strong that the more appointed officials you have on the MPO's boards the more regional that is the more collaborative the spending is in the oh dear sorry and of course I said no Tom you can go so this is just shows you what some of the other factors are that we look like what we looked at I'm running a little long so I'm not going to go into a lot of it but just for those of you who want to hold me keep me honest here I'm just showing you that I did do the analysis and I did look at other factors this is the effect of how much of the board are elected officials and the negative effect it's on this side of the zero line means that you have less regional spending due to that and some of the other characteristics like how much staff the MPO has what the median household income for the whole region is whether or not how extensive the transit system is both fixed and flexible route transit and then also how how different the the communities are within the region I'll get back to this in a minute on how much they spend on overall government spending so the takeaway here is simply this that is the incentives of the decision makers has a really big impact even once you control for some of the other factors that you would expect to affect how regional the spending is in a given region on transportation again characteristics of the region's communities matter but it's not clear that you have to have all rich or all poor other high highly homogenous communities within the region the design of the institutions matters that's it okay and then the last study I want to talk about is on regional land use planning this is the tricky one all right this is regional land use planning means that communities are sitting down and they're deciding you're going to get development and you're not all right and the reason they're doing that is to try to mitigate some of these negative externalities it's to say we don't want we as a region don't want you developing so quickly because it imposes costs on my community all right and so that community is often going to be reluctant to engage in that kind of collaboration right because they're giving up something important they're not just saving money or getting some service that they wouldn't have been able to get otherwise but they're actually giving up power over their economic future very few communities are excited about doing that but the benefits of course could be great if without it you typically get sprawl you get the picture of the nasty or suburban landscape and so this is the hard part this is the hardest one this is the thing that vexes most regions in terms of collaboration so here I did a study with two colleagues looking at a 2006 survey of California local government officials and there we asked them what kinds of collaborative land use planning arrangements they were involved in and a bunch of different questions about them and here again we also want to know what's the geographic clustering of this collaboration over land use and again the goal of that land use regional land use planning is to mitigate some of the negative externalities of uncoordinated planning and so we made these fancy network maps and then analyze the networks you don't have to read it just know that we did that that's also keeping me honest we did the work all right and here here's the interesting thing we found unlike the regional transportation area where a lot of collaboration takes place between dissimilar local governments in regional planning you have a huge tendency for similar units to collaborate so you don't have rich and poor collaborating on land use you don't have fast growing and slow growing you don't have old and new you've got new and new fast and fast slow and slow in other words the similarities both in the politics and the demographics and the land use characteristics of those communities are the biggest drivers of who collaborates with whom right and so in the California case the two key things that came out here is highly democratic communities collaborated with highly democratic communities and highly Republican communities to collaborate with highly Republican you don't see that in any of the other forms of collaboration and then also those with similar levels of Latino populations also collaborated more often than those with very different demographic makeups all right so those are the studies and so let me just summarize them if we're looking at scale economies so we want to go back to the question of what are the characteristics that lead some regions to collaborate well and other regions not to collaborate very well and the answer depends on what are they collaborating about what is the economic inefficiency that they're trying to solve and so if they want to collaborate to try to capture economies of scale the big question isn't the well the big question is let me put it that way can I just find partners to do this stuff with it's not that I've got to find partners that are exactly the same as mine it's not that I've got to find partners that have certain characteristics I just have to find them and then go through the work of figuring out how are we going to combine our fire services how are we going to combine our purchasing it may be difficult to do that politically but the key problem seems to be just overcoming those short-term transactions cost getting it done lots of collaboration collaboration takes place in lots of different ways and so when we think about are there more opportunities for that kind of collaboration in Detroit policies that can help local governments overcome some of those short-term transactions cost to find partners make a lot of sense on those collaborations intended to deal with positive externalities a question is are decision makers oriented locally or regionally right if the decision makers involved are oriented very locally then you're not going to get as much collaboration in particular if they're local elected officials we found that it's very difficult to get a high degree of collaboration to try to capture positive externalities and I never negative externalities when we think about are there potentials for more collaboration to drive to try to deal with things like land use and economic development and how that's distributed across the region in a way that has fewer negative benefits for other units the big question is similarity you've got to find partners that have similar preferences to engage in that kind of collaboration alright so what does that mean for Detroit I'm almost done again I started with this question can Detroit area communities help themselves through collaboration and here I think some of the direct lessons so it is the case that quite a lot of collaboration is taking place within the Metro Detroit region less than in other regions you saw that cold spot in the blue spot on the map of Metro Detroit and service sharing it's also the case on the publicly available data from the CRC surveys I'm not breaking any confidentiality here but you can all look at the website and see the data the city of Detroit is notably absent from most of the collaboration that goes on within Metro Detroit so in other words lots of other communities in the Metro Detroit region really however you define it are engaged in lots of collaboration city of Detroit much less so and there are a couple of reasons for that it's big it does a lot of stuff and remember when I said it's easier to collaborate when you're doing new services rather than older than trying to split up or change the way that you do existing services Detroit's been a full-service city for a long time and so it's been providing its own services for a long time and so it's hard to say I'm going to give up some of that now of course bankruptcy changes all of that and I'm not at this moment going to speculate about how it changes all of that but in the normal course of events it's difficult for a full-service city that does all sorts of stuff itself to collaborate because it's hard to give stuff up that they're already doing I mentioned new and expanded services and policies not just for Detroit but not just for places outside of Detroit but even within Detroit there may be opportunities to do things like homeland security or high high high level communications though these are all areas of potential new service that Detroit may benefit from as it gets its fiscal house in order and those may be areas where Detroit could very productively benefit from collaboration from other with other places within the region expanding decision-making authority beyond elected officials as I mentioned the transportation decision-making in Detroit is done by local elected officials the regional transit authority that I sit on is not it's appointed officials and so that's a nice example of already moving in that direction I think that the reason that the county executives don't sit themselves on the regional transit authority is for exactly this purpose it's intended to be region-wide and so you want not elected officials but people with more of a regional view so moving more in that direction not just in transportation but in other areas may lead to better collaboration across the region and again coming back to this negative externalities this land use and development question that's likely to continue to be extremely difficult due to the great disparities in pop in populations in income in class in race across the region that's the hard one to accomplish it's not the case that it can't be done but there are extra challenges involved and so I guess I'll put a different version of that statement up where yes I do believe that Detroit area communities can help themselves through collaboration but again it's more difficult it's not straightforward not everything is going to work and not everything is going to save money and that's it thank you any questions hi I was wondering you had a slide where you were talking about one of your insights that that places that collaborate tend to do so across multiple issues and multiple partners and there was a map with the state of Michigan I was wondering did just the map have you seen how that changes over time I'm wondering in terms of if the change in political wins and turnover that caused cities to drastically change their collaboration with all partners that's a great an excellent question so the data that we have is from 2010 so it's just one slice in time anecdotally one of the things that I didn't mention here but this this I think is totally relevant to your question is about leadership and and particularly changes in leadership often we see I see Melissa Roy here who is with Macomb County and she is part of sort of a new regime in Macomb County and a much more collaborative regime largely for this reason so you have a new county executive who's come into power there and it's often much easier for when you have that change in political leadership to kind of just change the culture in the place so we don't have the data but I'm gonna I would actually put money on seeing more collaboration in that part of the region due to that change in leadership now of course the Michigan Public Policy Survey which is where these data come from is an ongoing survey it's done twice a year every year and so over time there will be opportunities to redo that study haven't done it but what would I think would be really interesting is find places where you've had haven't changes in political leadership and see whether you get changes in collaboration as a result so thank you it's a good question others yeah hi David thank you thank you Liz that's great I have a question for you that may be naive but are all these collaborations or lack of collaboration so all those just driven locally or are there state incentives and disincentives to collaborate so you know we could talk for a really long time about that I'll try to just answer it shortly so the structure of local government and the powers that local governments have in Michigan lean towards local control so the default is that for things like providing municipal services or doing land-use policy and so on is local governments get to do that and so any collaboration has to be a is a voluntary decision by those governments to give up some power that they already have now you can incentivize that decision right and so there are some policies in place that do that so we talked about the regional transportation the federal government decided that they don't want the individual local governments to make all of those decisions they want those made on a regional basis because coordination is so important in transportation policy if it's not coordinated it doesn't work and so they require regions to collaborate in certain ways in order to get federal highway funds which is billions of dollars every year so that's an example of a federal program that that makes local governments collaborate on that one area now they don't collaborate as much as they might you know there are shades of collaboration and this one is light as opposed to some other regions that collaborate more largely because of how the regions function but but that's an example of a federal program that incentivizes or mandates really it mandates some of that collaboration and there's a state example too there's a program called the economic vitality investment program which has to do with revenue sharing so the state provides money for local governments to do some of their functions and there's extra money for communities that put in a proposal to do that work collaboratively it's small potatoes it's you know hundreds of thousands of dollars a year but one of the things that does do I mentioned that for municipal service sharing a policy that might be helpful there is helping local governments overcome some of those transactions costs of finding partners and that's what a lot of that money is intended to do so again there's there are no requirements to collaborate and that's why it's challenging because that fragmented authority means that it's the local governments that have the power to do these things already and they've got to choose to give up some of that power to collaborate so how do you offset some of those incentives okay sure hi Bill thank you very much you can anticipate a question coming from her position who practiced for many years in rural America and now in the metropolitan area and my question is a two-part question first of all I want to know do you perceive the necessity of maintaining our cities as they are I got the impression as you were identifying the ideal situation of collaboration you mentioned New York you mentioned Dima you mentioned Portland you're but you didn't mention the smaller cities how essential is it to maintain our core cities then I would ask if it is essential that we have those to what extent do we contribute to the demise of them by making it very easy to expand outside of the city I've seen that happen over the four and a five years I've been in Detroit when it was a vibrant city of four or five million people and now it's down to six or seven hundred people because they've spread out they have diluted they've taken tax basis they've taken the entire venture they've taken the educational institutions to take it all the things that made the city great now have gone did we contribute to the demise by making it also convenient for people to leave the core cities yes next no okay so to your to your second question you know the history though so the history of urban America and the suburbanization and you know that's that's there's a lot there I will say that in the Metro Detroit region there have been explicit public policies that have made it very easy for people to leave the city and populate the suburbs and kind of move out of the central city and certainly for the last half century or so that movement has created huge problems for the central cities largely to the benefit of the suburbs but I would say also has created problems in the suburbs as well with a sort of a diffusion of public life and an inability to provide the kinds of vibrant services and institutions that cities have what you do see in recent years in many places including Detroit is a reversal of that where people are choosing to move out of suburbs and back into cities because of some of those things that you don't have in suburbs so absolutely I mean I think it's pretty clear that there have been explicit public policies that have made it easy for people to leave and take all the good a lot of the good stuff out of cities somewhat irresponsibly I would say and so a lot of the arguments about the regional funding of the DIA for example we're around exactly that which is the people in the suburbs are you know have a responsibility to that institution because it's part of the region and so I think that you've seen more recognition although there are certainly folks in the suburbs who continue to say Detroit's not our problem and that mentality has driven a lot of the suburbanization but again I think you've seen in recent years some reversal of that in terms of like the the future of cities and are they still important absolutely so I hope I didn't give the impression that I think that regionalism is the be all and all there's a lot of there's a tension right because there's value to local control people in Ann Arbor for example don't necessarily want all the same things that people in Plymouth want the relatively similar community and so if we had one regional government making all the policies for that region then I may be less well off I get to live in a place where I've got more local control over the policies that I like and so regionalism has its downside there's some real value to local control as well it's more a question of balance right so there are some particular policies where local control creates these perversities creates these externalities or inefficiencies and those are the areas where collaboration I think makes a lot of sense but I but I totally agree with you that if you talk about there have been a number of attempts to dissolve cities into the townships underlying them within Michigan because it seems like they're very inefficient they're creating they're producing policies but there aren't many people and nobody has any money but when you ask should we dissolve the city no there's a lot of pride there's a lot of connection to local governments and local communities and I think that you know that's important and legitimate it just could be balanced by more regional collaboration to offset some of the inefficiencies caused by almost complete local control you know we've only got one more question okay we actually have a couple questions from Twitter so I figured I'd ask those one comes from an alum Matt Boris class of 09 how is professor Gerber so awesome let me answer that one I don't know if we have enough time can and the next question is how can metro regionalism and our intergovernment cooperation contribute to progressive anti-discrimination LGBT policy reforms good question so let's think about what is that sort of policy so I haven't talked a lot about social policy here I've talked about economic efficiency primarily of different sorts social policy is different right because it's not clear in every case whether the region like you know if you think about we talk about in political science the median voter that's like the person kind of like in the center of the distribution of preferences so you know every place has a lot of different kinds of people but who's the person kind of at the center that sort of represents that place and so a question is you know does a smaller unit or a larger unit leave you with that typical person being more progressive or less progressive so I think the answer to the question is what depends on what the region is it depends on how you make the region right so if you're thinking about metropolitan Detroit actually that's not the kind of policy that gets made at a local level but you know if you're looking at states for example and thinking about well Michigan is not the most progressive state but you know if that kind of policy was to be made across a number of states which states would you want to partner with in order to have a progressive outcome be the thing that that collective would produce and so I don't I'm not I don't know if that would be possible but that would be the situation where some sort of collaboration again I don't know if it would be across states across cities you know I guess there are sort of local there's state-level provisions for things like domestic partner benefits and that sort of thing so that might be the kind of policy where if you're collaborating across a number of states and it could get kind of a consortium across states to agree on uniform policies there may actually be some economic benefits to that and you may be able to get more progressive policies that way you can see I'm sort of doing some gymnastics here because I think the answer is largely that's not what regionalism is typically thought of as being the a good tool for it's more to solve these economic inefficiencies but I think you can think about ways that you might be able to move forward a progressive agenda this way as well I think we're done I'd like to thank all of you for joining us and these are such important topics I hope you will join us in the great hall and continue the conversation over a reception so again thank you for coming and please join me in a final congratulations to Elizabeth Herbert Thank you Thank you all very much