ARTICLE TENTH:  OF HOME RULE.

SEC. 1. The general assembly shall by general law delegate such legislative authority as from time to time it deems appropriate to towns, cities and boroughs relative to the powers, organization, and form of government of such political subdivisions. The general assembly shall from time to time by general law determine the maximum terms of office of the various town, city and borough elective offices. After July 1, 1969, the general assembly shall enact no special legislation relative to the powers, organization, terms of elective offices or form of government of any single town, city or borough, except as to (a) borrowing power, (b) validating acts, and (c) formation, consolidation or dissolution of any town, city or borough, unless in the delegation of legislative authority by general law the general assembly shall have failed to prescribe the powers necessary to effect the purpose of such special legislation.

SEC. 2. The general assembly may prescribe the methods by which towns, cities and boroughs may establish regional governments and the methods by which towns, cities, boroughs and regional governments may enter into compacts. The general assembly shall prescribe the powers, organization, form, and method of dissolution of any government so established.

In 1993, you put Hartford and Bridgeport on a list with Detroit and Newark as cities on life support. Do you still think that's true?

The specific phrase was "cities past the point of no return." I would have to amend that to say cities past the point of almost no return, because up to 1990 no city which had gone past three milestones; significant population loss, significant racial disparity between the city and suburbs and above all had dropped below 70 percent of per capita income (compared to its suburbs). No city had ever come back on the income scale.

Chicago did in this past decade. There was such an enormous gentrification that went on around The Loop. Chicago did get off the list, but 17 other cities joined it and Hartford sunk down farther on that list. Cleveland and Detroit stabilized, but I would have to say that the overall picture, even at the end of the decade of the most sustained prosperity our country has seen, is that these cities where there is economic and racial isolation have not changed.

Your book "Cities Without Suburbs" introduced the idea of elastic vs. inelastic cities, in other words, a city that could physically expand, usually through annexation, has a better chance to solve its problems than cities frozen into historic boundaries, such as Hartford. Are you still thinking that way?

Yes, but most of my work has been in the Northeast or the Middle West. Annexation is impossible in New England, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, and it's improbable in many Midwestern communities. You really have to think of other strategies: regional land use and transportation planning, regional mixed-income housing policies, inclusionary zoning or regional tax-base sharing.

You're not going to be able to change the nature of your governments, but you can at least change what they're called upon to do on a multi-municipal basis.

You recommended that small and medium metro areas could solve some of their problems by forming metro governments. Is that idea gaining any traction? How important is the Louisville experience?

Louisville was the fourth of the formal consolidations that occurred in the 1990's. Athens and Clarke County, Ga.; Augusta and Richmond County, Ga.; Kansas City and Wyandotte County, Kan., and then Louisville and Richmond County [Ky.]. There are another half dozen that are under very active consideration. It's been voted on and rejected last November in Albuquerque, and it's going to be voted on again this November.

There are some places that are considering it where it makes no sense whatsoever. Buffalo is considering it; Pittsburgh is considering it. They've got nothing to consolidate to. The essence of city-county consolidation is when the central city merges with the county, the county is bringing a large amount of unincorporated, often undeveloped, land, or additional higher-income residents, or additional commercial tax base as a dowry, if you will, to the merger. It's expanding the resource base of the central city.

That's not going to happen in a Buffalo or Pittsburgh, because in all the consolidations that have occurred, any smaller, established free-standing independent municipality has refused to join. There's not been a smaller municipality that's joined the central city-county consolidation. Anywhere. Ever.

Connecticut has no county government. Would we be better off with counties or some other form of regional polity?

There's no sense in bringing back counties with the geography they had, because the geography doesn't fit the [current] development pattern. If you did anything, it might be to have the state empower your councils of government with more decision-making responsibility, number one, and then to make sure that decision-making responsibility is exercised through proportional voting, so that Hartford doesn't have equal votes with some 5,000-person town, for example, in the Capitol Region Council of Governments.

The councils of government do have significant responsibility for the allocation of federal transportation funds as a result of functions of federal law. There's no such parallel in the whole land-use-planning effort, there's no such parallel on housing policy on a regional basis. So, if there is going to be any intermediary between the state government and 169 towns it probably ought to be something like a vitalized system of regional councils, not counties as you knew them.

Fifteen years ago the mayor of Indianapolis, William Hudnut, famously said, "You can't be a suburb of no place." Is that still true, or can a so-called edge city, or self-contained suburb, ignore its center city.

Well, interestingly, there have been studies done that show that even when you have edge cities there's a tremendous amount of interaction between what's going on in the edge city and what's going on in the central city, above all in the area of business services. The accountants, the lawyers, other kinds of specialized occupations, are highly concentrated in central cities and they are a support mechanism for some of the companies that are out there in the edge cities. And with smaller childless households, whether on the front end of the careers or the back end, some cities are coming back in style as exciting places to live. I would think in the long run that traditional central cities may have a better future than some of the edge cities, particularly the older edge cities

Are any cities getting it right?

Getting it right? Getting it all right? My short list of places that only have to reach a little bit beyond where they are to really be all that they can be, in the Army's term, would include metro-Portland, Ore.; metro-Seattle, metro-Charlotte. I think very highly of Madison-Dane County, Wis. A very significant community that gets almost all right, although it's only a portion of a region, but it's almost as big as the Greater Hartford region is Montgomery County, Md. Eight hundred, seventy-five thousand people, 500 square miles. They have the best urban government in America, and they've been so for 30 years.

They have land-use planning, they have the nation's best housing policies. They have a unified countywide school system, as are all the school systems in Maryland, quite high quality and they're a real model.
A decade ago you praised Connecticut's affordable-housing law. Do you still feel positively toward it?

You've been addressing the issue which many other states have not. But, there's a much better mousetrap out there than the affordable-housing land-use appeals process, and that is inclusionary zoning.

There are now over 135 cities and counties in the country that have local laws that mandate that a certain percentage of new development above a threshold scale must be affordable to people below a designated income level.

I did some calculations (that indicate) the affordable housing land-use appeals process has yielded directly and indirectly about 3,000 units affordable housing statewide since 1989. If in that same 15 years you'd had a typical inclusionary zoning policy in place statewide, which would have taken a state law, you would have had 18,000 units, produced by private developers.

Michael Porter at Harvard has talked about building jobs in the inner city. Do you see that being done at any scale around the country?

I did an analysis of 33 of what were held forth to me as exemplary community development corporations in the country. Of the 33, when you look at the census data regarding the communities they served, in 27 of the 33 the poverty rates are higher at the end of the time of the study period than at the beginning. Whatever wonders they'd done on mini-project basis, it hadn't at that point reversed the tide, if you will, in those neighborhoods.

I haven't redone that analysis for the 1990s based on the 2000 census, and my sense is that the numbers will look a little better than they did between 1970 and 1990. Some of that may be temporary. A lot of folks that had jobs in 1999 when the census was collecting income data don't have jobs in 2004.

Towns Rethinking Home Rule;  With Dwindling State Funding And Growing Demands For Service, Communities Are More Open To Forging Regional Ties To Save Money
July 21, 2003, By GREGORY SEAY, Courant Staff Writer
The state's financial squeeze is prompting more Connecticut communities to look at partnership opportunities with neighbors to provide vital services more efficiently and inexpensively.  For instance, Berlin plans to build a new animal control facility large enough to accommodate the needs of neighboring New Britain and Newington.

Four towns - Cornwall, Falls Village, Salisbury and Sharon - are sharing the $8,000 annual cost of a new daily bus service to transport elderly and handicapped citizens to medical appointments.  Public policy experts and other proponents of regionalization say the new openness could be one of the few benefits that emerge from the statewide fiscal crisis.

"Regionalization has a better chance to succeed in this climate than it ever has before," said David Baram, former Bloomfield mayor and a proponent of municipal cooperation.  The deeply embedded notion of home rule has long made regionalization a tough sell for communities skeptical of ceding control of services, observers say. Moreover, they were wary of persistent prodding from outsiders, mostly state leadership, in promoting the concept.

Until the middle of the last century, county government was the mechanism for coordinating regional services to communities, particularly police, jails and courts. In 1959, legislators abolished a system that had grown corrupt and ineffective.  Over the years, various public-policy organizations, such as the Capitol Region Council of Governments, emerged to promote regional cooperation. But interest in regionalization remained dim, observers say, as long as the suburbs were buffered from the problems plaguing Connecticut's cities, such as crime and financial pressures.

But as those pressures have spread and the state's aid spigot dried up this budget season, more suburban communities are wrestling with providing public services without drowning property owners in taxes to pay for them.  It has also opened more taxpayers to consider what regional cooperation has to offer.  In June, about 200 people from the New Haven area and Naugatuck Valley participating in a regionalization forum at Yale University were surveyed about their support for regional strategies for financing local government and public services.

Some 54 percent favored them, including sharing taxes regionally to fund services, said Yale Professor Cynthia Farrar. More than three-fourths of those in favor also indicated they wanted a say in how those dollars are spent, Farrar said.  David Russell, a former Granby first selectman who until recently promoted regionalism from the state level, said residents in many communities are probably ahead of their elected leaders in being more open to cooperative ventures.

More communities are plowing ahead. Barkhamsted, already a regional participant in a high school, dump and mental-health services, agreed recently to pay to extend Winsted's sewer line 1,000 feet into Barkhamsted to boost regional economic development that officials say should benefit both towns.  Guilford, which has begun adding paid full-time firefighters to its previously all-volunteer force, has established a hazardous-materials team to serve the needs regionally of communities east of New Haven.

In doing so, the town, whose residents recently struggled through three ballots to adopt this year's budget, qualifies for federal dollars to fund equipment and training for the team.  "Regionalization is an issue we're going to have to face," said Guilford First Selectman Carl Balestracci Jr.  But there are pockets of resistance, even among communities that previously have embraced regional cooperation. Cromwell, citing budget concerns, backed out of teaming with Berlin on the dog pound, and will continue to lease space at Portland's animal facility.

East Hampton leaders this spring considered closing the town dump and sharing the larger, state-of-the-art transfer station next door in Portland to net $43,000 in savings the first year.  They later decided to keep the transfer station open for now, but will continue to explore a linkup with Portland. Last year, East Hampton, Marlborough, Hebron and East Haddam created a regional health district.

"Communities are reluctant to let go of services and be at the mercy of their neighbors," said Rick Porth, executive director of the Capitol Region Council of Governments.
Keith R. Ainsworth, a former Haddam first selectman, said communities should be encouraged to pursue such collaborations. But he cautioned against allowing outside groups to promote such services, especially ones imposing a fee, or "tax" on communities to participate.

One area that presents perhaps the greatest opportunity for cooperation - but also generates the most emotion - is sharing education services.  "Education is an area that's ripe for delivering a better educational product for less cost," said Baram. "but it tends to also be the most emotional."  Not surprisingly, advocates for municipal government to act responsibly and efficiently with their tax dollars support regionalism, as long as services aren't diminished.

"When you consider the economies of scale, it's a good idea," said East Hampton resident James Mathias, president of the taxpayer advocacy group Common Sense. 

The Capitol Region Council of Governments' new regional plan - the first since 1988 - urges the region's 29 cities and towns to preserve open land, to revitalize Hartford, and to replenish the region's aging workforce.

As a purely advisory document, the CRCOG plan is toothless. But in a region that is consuming land at nearly triple its rate of population growth, that lost 28,000 jobs during the 1990s, and where poverty is concentrated in urban areas where much of its future workforce is growing up, advocates say the plan is crucial to the region's future.

"If Hartford fails and we lose jobs left and right and people leave, where are we then?" said Susan Errickson, chairwoman of CRCOG's regional planning commission and head of Tolland's planning and zoning commission. "Hartford has some real problems. The purpose of the report is to say that we're all in this together, and hopefully that's what people come away with from it."

The CRCOG plan echoes a recent study backed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford, which showed that Connecticut is developing land much more quickly than it is adding people as population spreads out from the region's core.  "This continuing trend of movement away from the region's
center is increasingly raising concerns about the loss of open space, development pressure on our rural communities, the negative impacts on our central city and some of the older suburbs, and the lack of access for many to jobs spread across the region," the CRCOG plan says.

While the suburbs have seen steady growth in population, jobs, housing values and wealth as people moved out from the region's core, "this growth is not sustainable with a failing core city," the plan says.  "We're seeing a lot of alarming trends," said John P. Guszkowski, community development planner for CRCOG.  A recent national study of sprawl found that while the population of metro Hartford grew by 7.6 percent between 1982 and 1997, its urbanized land increased by 20.4 percent.

The CRCOG report says that if current development trends continue, nearly 9,000 acres of rural land - nearly the area of Bolton - would be under new subdivisions by 2015.  In a region where 55 percent of the population is over 35, the workforce is aging. Because Hartford contains 22 percent of the region's children and teenagers - compared with just 17 percent of the region's total population - educational attainment there is a regional problem. "Without such progress, the entire region's economic performance will suffer," the CRCOG report says.

Errickson and CRCOG officials said they hope that town officials would use the plan in deciding where housing and commercial development should go, and in pushing to change how local government is financed, such as reducing local dependence on property taxes to pay for public schools.

But the plan also says the region needs to think about development beyond Hartford. The plan designates six "Economic Development Areas of Regional Significance" - around the Westfarms and Buckland malls, downtown Hartford, Bradley International Airport, Rentschler Field in East Hartford and in the Griffin industrial area that borders Windsor and Bloomfield.

One idea, Guszkowski said, might be to have multitown committees - say, officials from Manchester, South Windsor, East Hartford and Vernon for Buckland - to help plan development around those zones.  As areas that can best support large, region-scale commercial and industrial areas, those six areas would be priorities for that sort of large-scale development.

The plan's many recommendations include:

Municipal finance. Work with the state to decrease reliance on property taxes, and encourage tax-base sharing among towns to reduce competition for growth, which fuels sprawl.

Transportation. Support CRCOG's regional transit plan, including construction of four busways and adding commuter rail between Springfield, Hartford and New Haven.

Land use. Encourage commercial and residential development in areas where roads and sewers already exist; discourage it elsewhere.

Conservation. Have towns focus on preservation of "conservation corridors" that link larger environmentally sensitive and preserved land such as river flood plains and forests.

The regional plan will be unveiled at a series of "open house" meetings: Tuesday in Windsor town Hall, Wednesday at the Tolland Agricultural Center in the John Elliot Building, 24 Hyde Ave., Vernon; and May 6 at the Boy Scout Hall, 695 Hopmeadow St. in Simsbury. All begin at 6 p.m.

A public hearing on the plan is scheduled May 8 at 7 p.m. in West Hartford's town hall. 

By Matthew Strozier - Staff Writer -  Stamford ADVOCATE
October 7, 2002

Forty-two years ago last week, county government in Connecticut officially ended, closing the book on an almost 300-year-old institution. This year, the anniversary again went without public notice.  By the time of its demise, county government was nominal. Three county commissioners oversaw county jails and the sheriff system, but that was about it.

Four decades later, regionalism is making a comeback of sorts. Fairfield County officials say traffic congestion, housing shortages, bioterrorism threats and suburban sprawl must be addressed jointly. And debate over regionalism -- the word coined to describe the movement -- has reached the gubernatorial race.

While calling for an end to home rule may amount to political suicide, Connecticut's intensely fractionalized system of governance may be forced to adapt in coming years, experts and politicians say. If it does, Connecticut will join a trend in other states.  "I would say that the public is probably ahead of the elected officials" in supporting regional governance, said Thomas Wright, executive vice president of the New York City-based Regional Plan Association.  "And local officials are often ahead of state and
federal officials."

Regionalism means different things to different people  -- everything from full-fledged county government with police officers and parks to towns purchasing salt together. Connecticut has regional planning agencies -- sometimes called councils of government -- but some say they are not enough.  "Many of our basic services should be coordinated, in my opinion, across city borders," Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy said. "I think, intellectually, people understand that and support it. But many people say, 'But if we do this, where is it going to stop?' "  Problems created by the current system are clear, critics say.

Dr. Anthony Iton, Stamford's director of health and social services, pointed to health and bioterrorism. Connecticut's health system is parochial, he said, with health administration starting at one municipal border and ending at the next.  Since Sept. 11, deficiencies in this system have been exposed, Iton said.  Regional emergency plans in the event of an attack on the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Buchanan, N.Y., for example, are coordinated within each municipality, not across the region.

"We have a plan, but how well is it going to work if Greenwich is doing one thing and Norwalk is doing another?" Iton said. "I don't know Greenwich's plan, I don't know Norwalk's plan. I don't know anybody else's plan."  Iton said there are efforts to coordinate disaster plans regarding Indian Point but the area is far behind Westchester County, N.Y. Westchester has county government and is home to Indian Point.

But opposition to another layer of government -- some might say bureaucracy -- generally runs strong in home-rule Connecticut and New England. Businesses and small towns are particularly wary, several officials said.  "You have to remember that people are now asking for regional government, and they had it but they threw it out," said Nelson Brown, 80, speaker of the state House of Representatives in 1957 and for a brief legislative session in 1958.

"Home rule is the way it's done. And anybody who says 'No home rule' is usually the first fella who gets handed his going-away papers. It's a very strong movement."

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Curry says regional cooperation is vital and that he supports more power for regional planning agencies in economic development and land use. But he says he would act only with local support.  Curry said the state encourages suburban sprawl by forcing towns to compete against one another for tax revenue-generating development. Make towns and municipalities less reliant on property taxes, he said, and it would free them to coordinate land-use decisions.

"The population realizes they used to fight regionalism because they wanted to protect the character, often the rural character, of their community," Curry said.  "Now they realize that without regionalism, they can't protect it."  Nuala Forde, a campaign spokeswoman for Republican Gov. John Rowland, said regional efforts should be voluntary.  "It's already happening, and it's working," she said.

Forde said Curry wants to impose regional cooperation and that Rowland does not. She declined to comment specifically on whether the governor would support greater power for regional planning agencies.

The debate over regionalism often comes down to education, Malloy said, with one town worrying it will be forced to accept students from another town. That usually is the "poison pill" for the effort, he said.  Tension between economically successful and struggling towns also can be a roadblock, Wright said.  "And the communities that are doing well now often worry they have the most to lose in these types of structures," he said.

If regional cooperation increases, Connecticut's former county government is unlikely to be a model. It was widely derided when the Legislature voted it out of existence, and its passing appears to have been preceded by little debate in Stamford.  Just before it disappeared, The Associated Press reported the "passing of an era" of county government. The article's final sentence read: "County government will die at midnight tonight -- but in passing, it may still cause a problem or two."

"No, it hasn't, but if we don't keep polishing it, it will," said Bruhl, keynote speaker of the chamber's annual economic outlook luncheon held at Milbrook Country Club.  A number of worrisome issues, ranging from antiquated infrastructure to slow population growth, could stall the area's competitiveness if not addressed, Bruhl said.

"A company can't thrive in a community that is failing," he said. "So what the future is likely to look like happens to be a business issue."  Some of these issues may not be pressing, but they will be in the future, he said.  The population growth rate in Fairfield County, for example, is growing at double the rate of the rest of the state, but it's growing at about half of the national average, Bruhl said. From July 2001 to July 2002, Fairfield County added about 12,000 people.  The number of automobile registrations is double the number of births, he said.  Further, the younger population is decreasing while the 65-and-older population is increasing, he said.

"While the nation is aging, Fairfield County is aging faster than average," Bruhl said.  Area employers will see a decline in the entry-level labor pool and will need to       figure out how to retain their older workers, he said. Population growth points to other problematic trends, he added.  For example, Stamford's population growth outpaces job growth slightly.  However, in eastern Fairfield County towns such as Shelton, job growth far surpasses population growth.  That's because since 1992, only one major office building has been constructed in Stamford -- UBS Warburg, Bruhl said. But in Trumbull and Shelton, four and a half million square feet of office space has been built in that time period.  Another issue is affordable housing.

"Two people making $55,000 apiece can't buy a house until they get to Stratford," he said.  "People don't work in the ZIP code they live in," said Bruhl, adding that this
phenomenon is adding to the transportation problems plaguing the region.  "I think people look at the traffic on I-95 and say, 'Wow, there must be a huge population growth,' " said Peter Berg, executive director of the Greenwich Land Trust. "The reality is that people are spreading out."

"We have to be aware of how interdependent we are and how our future depends on the health of the region," Berg said.  Other issues that need attention are transportation, energy capacity, telecommunications and education. "We will see the deterioration of relative competitiveness because we have not paid attention to these problems," Bruhl said.

He predicted there will be a gradual public awakening to these issues.  "We will make these investments," he said.