| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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sewerage, solid waste, public welfare, administration, health, education, and libraries. To better evaluate the magnitude of the government services we examined, table 1.1 shows the distribution of employment, payroll, and expenditures for local government units in the United States; these figures are shown separately for counties and municipalities. Townships and special-purpose governments are not included in the table. The government functions that we consider in this book cover more than 80% of local government employment in the United States and close to 70% of local government expenditures. Education is the largest component of employment, payroll, and expenditures of the services that we consider, followed by police protection. Compared to all types of local government units, county governments have larger shares of their staffing, payroll, and expenditures in public welfare, hospitals, and health, whereas municipalities have larger shares of their staffing, payroll, and expenditures in police and fire protection, libraries, parks and recreation, housing and community development, sewerage, and solid waste management.
To examine the potential savings due to scale economies and efficiency improvements, we constructed a data set which effectively isolated similar types of government structures. This cannot be done nationally because the form of local government in the United States has evolved over more than 400 years, encompassing experiences from a variety of local government traditions. To begin, we identified three regions that were fairly homogeneous with respect to the founding of their local governments’ structures. These are the areas of the former Northwest Territory, the early colonies in the southern United States, and the desert Southwest. See figure 1.1.
The Midwest sample includes the Great Lakes states that were a part of the Northwest Territory (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio). These states were formed with local governments that were constructed on a township/county format employing a mix of geographic and linear surveying borders. Each county was provided with six to 12 townships and a county seat. In the late eighteenth century, a foot traveler could easily walk across a township and back in a day, and county residents were no