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I appreciated Roger Coryell’s informative article explaining the important role special districts play in rural areas. It also raised a broader question worth asking: When do multiple small districts make sense, and when would residents be better served by a single local government?
Districts often fill important service gaps, but because they are small and receive little public scrutiny, questions naturally arise about their governance, financial oversight and accountability. Ultimately, districts are neither good nor bad. It just depends on the situation. The question is: What governance structure delivers the highest-quality services at the lowest long-term cost while maintaining accountability to the people it serves?
I’d like to apply Coryell’s analysis to a little thought experiment concerning the Ukiah Valley. Imagine that the Ukiah Valley is without a city — that it’s just a collection of separate districts, each providing a needed service. For services not provided by districts, residents rely on the county. There’s PG&E for electricity and gas, four water districts, two sanitation districts, a fire district, and a parks and recreation district. People in the valley contract on their own for garbage collection, use the sheriff for public safety, and rely on the county for planning and building services and road maintenance.
This crazy quilt of mini-governments would suffer from a number of problems. First, you would have multiple boards of directors and duplication of everything needed to operate including equipment, information technology, personnel, offices, overhead, etc. This would be unnecessarily expensive and inefficient. Under a single governmental entity, however, you could consolidate resources to share expenses and even hire professional staff such as grant writers whose work would benefit all departments.
Second, because the Ukiah Valley doesn’t have a huge population, it would be difficult to fill 40 positions on eight small volunteer boards. In addition, as Coryell pointed out, how would we know if these boards were being financially accountable to ratepayers, planning for future capital needs and providing services at a professional level?
Furthermore, coordinating projects involving multiple districts, such as a road maintenance project that also requires water and sewer infrastructure replacement, would be nearly impossible. Each district’s board of directors would have to agree that it’s a worthwhile project, and that they would have the necessary capital funds to contribute.
Finally, with this crazy quilt of governmental service providers, there would be no constraints on where or how development happens. As long as services were available to developers, sprawl would ensue without the benefit of a community plan.
While this isn’t exactly the situation in the Ukiah Valley, it is close. We have a city that provides an array of public services. But just outside Ukiah’s roughly seven square miles, the chaos and consequences of multiple districts is on full display.
Several of them cannot fill their vacant board seats. Two are faced with the prospect of a $9m capital improvement project that they hadn’t planned on because the county decided to build a roundabout just north of Raley’s shopping center. Others face deteriorating infrastructure that will cost their ratepayers tens of millions of dollars in the not-too-distant future.
And we are seeing the result of a lack of coordination between jurisdictions with, for example, the new Amazon delivery center and U-Haul facility. These projects were approved by the county without consulting either CalTrans or the city regarding potential traffic impacts in an area that is already congested.
Let’s revisit the question of when multiple small districts make sense as applied to the current situation in the Ukiah Valley: Which governance structure delivers the highest-quality services at the lowest long-term cost while maintaining accountability to the people it serves? Given that the City of Ukiah already has the staff, expertise and infrastructure to provide these services, it makes sense to integrate, as much as is feasible, the current fragmented network of districts into the city—a single efficient, accountable entity. And this is one of the strongest arguments in favor of the city’s current annexation proposal.
The word “annexation” can sound like an aggressive land grab. But it’s just a bureaucratic process that has a bad name. The simple truth is that Ukiah Valley residents’ futures are linked. We will sink or swim together. Consolidating services through annexation will save people money, promote good planning and economic development, strengthen accountability and better position our community for the decades ahead. One Valley, A Better Future.
Well said.
Great job breaking down a complicated subject. Makes you wonder how much the big money behind the anti-annexation campaign benefits personally from the unaccountability that comes from crazy quilt of special districts at the expense of the rest of the public…
Elected board members of Special Districts are our neighbors who represent and actually listen to us, the homeowners and voters. You hear so many people complain about not trusting city, county, and state governments, about them getting too big and wanting too much. Special Districts are board members are not like that – we need to keep them and get the larger governments to leave them alone – no bullying these people who work so hard for us, the local voters!