What’s it like for cities to merge? Ask Thomas Terry

With the pressure on Minnesota cities to save money and get more efficient -- to create the "new normal" -- you'd think Thomas Terry would be in demand. At least to check his memory.

Terry is the city administrator in Elko New Market about 30 miles south of the Twin Cities. Before that, he was community development director in Norwood Young America about 40 miles southwest of the cities.

As you might guess from the long names, both cities are the results of mergers of two smaller cities, Norwood Young America in 1997 and Elko New Market in 2007. And, as Terry will tell you, both have benefited substantially from their consolidations.

The real goal is the long term, he says -- one city hall instead of two, one public works facility, one city clerk. But even in the short term, a review he conducted two years after the merger of Elko and New Market showed that officials of the joined city had held taxes flat and increased services for residents.

Elko New Market, in fast-growing Scott County, has had an advantage of an increasing tax base, but even so, it's interesting to see that when the community consolidated and streamlined, it chose to add services, not cut taxes. Police patrol hours are up, street work and other public projects got done, youth soccer and basketball programs expanded.

Nonetheless it's worth examining as government at all levels tries to save a taxpayer dollar wherever it can.

For full consolidation to work, Terry says, you need a history of trust, equal partners that buy in to the idea, geographic proximity. But even without full consolidation, entities can share services, do things jointly, tackle projects together, he says.

Interestingly, that dovetails with the findings this month by the Minnesota Commission on Service Innovation, created in the last legislative session to examine ways government can trim budgets and still produce quality service.

Among the commission's recommendations is to create a state entity to guide cities and other local governments, identifying the ways joint action can help and helping them achieve savings.

When I talked to him on the phone Wednesday, Terry thought that might be a good idea. And he mentioned the Scott County venture known as SCALE, which gets that county's local governments at the table planning jointly.

But he did point out such a state body did once exist. The Board of Government Innovation and Cooperation existed from 1993 until 2002 and even, the new commission noted, provided a grant to help Norwood and Young America combine.

It was closed in a budget-cutting move.

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