Excerpt from Survey of County Zoning Administration in Florida The Problem of Government tn Leon County, by Penrose B. Jackson, Fred Bair, Jr and James J Flannery. 1955. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The counties of Florida play a special role because of the settlement patterns of the state. Nearly half the population lives outside a city, and many others reside in a small municipality. For many citizens the local government they know and on which they depend is one of 67 counties. These units cover every inch of Florida and so every citizen is a county resident. The quality of life, then, depends very much on the functioning of these counties. They must be organized, managed, and financed so as to provide a huge variety of services to a society that is heavily urbanized. This book seeks to make the reader well aware of these obligations, and it introduces a companion principle, home rule. The counties must have the operating freedom and the resources to meet their responsibilities, and that flexibility must be provided by higher levels of government, particularly the State. The finances of counties, as well as other local governments, were being publicly debated in 2007-2008. Two chapters of this book provide important perspectives on the issues involved.

City-country consolidation builds upon the Progressive tradition of favoring structural reform of local governments. This volume looks at some important issues confronting contemporary efforts to consolidate governments and develops a theoretical approach to understanding both the motivations for pursuing consolidation and the way the rules guiding the process shape the outcome. Individual chapters consider the push for city-county consolidation and the current context in which such decisions are debated, along with several alternatives to city-county consolidation. The transaction costs of city-county consolidation are compared against the costs of municipal annexation, inter-local agreements, and the use of special district governments to achieve the desired consolidation of services. The final chapters compare competing perspectives for and against consolidation and put together some of the pieces of an explanatory theory of local government consolidation.

Facing cutbacks in federal and state assistance and a new wave of taxpayer revolts, local governments have renewed interest in local government consolidation as a way of achieving efficiencies of scale in response to citizen demands for services. Yet the vast majority of consolidation efforts fail, either during the process of drafting a charter or once they reach the ballot - only five have passed since 1990; only thirty-two have been successfully implemented since the first, when the city of New Orleans merged with Orleans Parish in 1805. What accounts for the high failure rate and what factors led to successful consolidations? This volume presents thirteen comparable case studies of consolidation campaigns and distills the findings.