Tale of two mergers: Jacksonville

It's been a big half-century for Jacksonville.

During that time, this city, formerly best known for the smell emanating from its paper mills, has built miles of new bridges and roads, netted an NFL team and then the Super Bowl and lured dozens of major businesses to town, among other accomplishments. Now, its signature smell is that of coffee beans roasting at the Maxwell House plant downtown.

Many in the city say the most important milestone of all is the passage of a dry piece of legislation dealing with governmental structure: The city's consolidation with Duval County on Oct. 1, 1968.

It's a day memorialized in what might be Jacksonville's most famous photo, a black and white image depicting then-mayor Hans Tanzler posing with actress Lee Meredith at the city's new boundary next to a sign proclaiming it "the bold new city of the South."

It's also a day city officials say is responsible for making all the other milestones possible.

"It's been 40 years since we consolidated, and I think most people would agree that we have come a long way since then," said Richard Mullaney, Jacksonville's general counsel. "We have truly transformed ourself from a slow-moving Southern town to a very different kind of city. We have the Jaguars, we had the Super Bowl, we have a great deal of economic prosperity and the trend is toward improvement downtown. There are a number of reasons for that transformation, and one of the big ones is consolidation."

Consolidation's case study

If there is a case study on consolidation to be had, Duval County is it, both in Florida and across the country, according to experts on the issue.

It's the only successful consolidation in Florida, and it sparked a wave of other consolidations throughout the country in the 1970s. Mullaney said he still receives a stream of near-constant phone calls from other communities wanting to know how Jacksonville did it.

Like most other cities to succeed in consolidating, Jacksonville's eventual merger followed at least one failed referendum vote in 1935.

In 1967, when the consolidation vote passed 55,000 to 30,000, Jacksonville was a 37-square-mile city with a population of about 150,000. Its schools were unaccredited, air and water pollution were rampant, and several of its elected officials had been indicted on charges of bribery and larceny, said James Rinaman Jr., an attorney who helped spearhead the plan in the 1960s.

The grand jury in the case ordered the remaining governmental officials to revamp.

"Quite frankly, it came about in Jacksonville as a result of a crisis," Mullaney said. "It's very difficult to adopt a consolidated government absent crisis, because there will always be embedded interests that will be opposed to it."

Mayor Hans Tanzler, who supported the consolidation, ran for re-election unopposed in a new 844-square-mile Jacksonville with a population of 500,000. Post-consolidation, Jacksonville is still the largest city - square-mile-wise - in the contiguous United States.

The new consolidated government boasted reduced property taxes for years after consolidation. Jacksonville has reduced its ad valorem taxes every year for the past 13 years, making its millage rate the lowest of any large county in Florida today, Mullaney said.

It's a benefit of consolidation experts say should not be counted upon.

"We had a lot of waste and inefficiency pre-consolidation," Mullaney said. "Now, we don't have overlapping jurisdictions for fire and police, and we don't have duplication of services."

City officials also credit the consolidation with unifying the city and county to accomplish major infrastructure improvements through the Better Jacksonville Plan, attract economic development and net the Jacksonville Jaguars in the 1990s and then the Super Bowl in 2004.

Tripling the city's population overnight didn't hurt, either, as it let the city qualify for a new tier of federal grants and loans and improved its bond rating to help fund new projects, city officials said.

Mullaney said much of Jacksonville's success in consolidating lies in its decision to create a strong-mayor form of government in which the mayor is essentially the executive director of the whole county.

Rinaman said the accountability that form of government created has been the most important benefit of consolidation.

"Not having responsibility spread all over the countryside is probably the key achievement," Rinaman said. "The mayor is responsible for just about everything, and is therefore more responsive. If something goes right or wrong, there's no question about which governmental body is to blame."

Academic studies also point to more successes than failures in the years following Jacksonville's consolidation.

Milan Dluhy, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who just finished a study of the efficiency and effectiveness of the Jacksonville merger, said Jacksonville comes out on the positive side of many of his comparisons with Tampa and Hillsborough County, which are not consolidated, from 1957 until now.

Jacksonville comes out ahead on per capita property taxes, has fewer government employees and has created twice as much "value added by manufacturing," a measure that accounts for higher-paying manufacturing jobs, Dluhy said.

Spending for the two communities was roughly equal during the period studied, Dluhy said. Jacksonville incurred more debt, but Dluhy said that could be a result of its willingness to take out bonds to build new infrastructure.

"The edge on the indicators I looked at was definitely more toward Jacksonville, especially on the economic and tax indicators," Dluhy said. "In political science, Jacksonville is viewed as a model because they've been one of the few consolidation efforts to succeed, and because they've been at it for so long. Looking at a consolidation three or four years down the line is one thing. But what does it mean 30 or 40 years down the road? If Jacksonville is a model, what happens is that consolidated governments gain the advantage and keep it."

Police, fire windfall

Other studies paint a murkier picture of post-consolidation Jacksonville.

J. Edwin Benton, a University of South Florida political science professor who measured property tax revenues, total spending and public safety spending in post-consolidation Jacksonville in a 1984 study, said he found some surprising negatives, such as drastically increased spending on public safety.

"We began to scratch our heads and say, â€òThat's just not supposed to happen,' " Benton said. "It turns out the old outgoing City Council members in Jacksonville were mad as hornets when this referendum passed in 1967, and they decided to sabotage things by raising the salaries of police and fire by something like 25 percent. It would have been a nice time to be a police officer or firefighter, but it really embarrassed the new City Council."

Bert Swanson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida, said consolidated governments concentrate power in one place, and said having pro-growth leaders holding positions of concentrated power in Jacksonville proved to be a positive thing for the city for years. But Swanson, who has studied Jacksonville's consolidation, said that form of government may be ill-equipped to deal with neighborhood needs and concerns, an issue he said is gaining prominence in Jacksonville as "people want to be able to say whether or not they want a Wal-Mart down the street."

And Swanson, who has studied Jacksonville's consolidation, said years after the fact, Jacksonville's consolidation may not seem as rosy as it once did. Swanson pointed out the Jacksonville Community Council Inc., which measures quality-of-life issues in the city in two annual studies, has identified scores of problems in the city through its post-consolidation years, from race relations to zoning troubles.

Even Rinaman said Jacksonville hasn't succeeded on all counts, and names growth management and comprehensive planning as a major post-consolidation failure. Rinaman said while the city did upgrade its pre-consolidation growth management system, it allowed spot and strip zoning to spread throughout the county under its watch, squandering an opportunity to think big.

"The old county would let them build subdivisions with no drainage, no curb and gutter and no streetlights," Rinaman said. "We did get some regulations on the books, at least. But we had the opportunity to control the growth of the entire county, and the political leaders missed the boat."

Few studies are available measuring residents' opinions of the consolidated government.

In 1978, a scientific poll conducted by the Florida Times-Union found that 77 percent of residents surveyed said consolidation improved city services, and 71 percent said Jacksonville was a better place to live due to consolidation.

It's been enough of a success that other communities are still seeking to follow in its footsteps. A group of public officials and community leaders from Escambia County traveled to Jacksonville earlier this year to hear how it accomplished its merger.

Escambia County Commissioner Gene Valentino said he left convinced it would be irresponsible to not consolidate, saying Jacksonville has created a model for greater efficiency in government.

"I left feeling like doing nothing is not an option," Valentino said. "To compete for economic development, we have to think globally. Being able to cooperate regionally lets us do this in a qualitative way. And just knowing about the financial incentives and the efficiencies we have an opportunity to create seems like reason enough to consider this."

Mullaney said he'll be traveling to Escambia County soon to give the same presentation to a larger group.

Mullaney acknowledges that structure alone doesn't create good, efficient government, and said Jacksonville needs good leaders to work out problems that plague all cities. But he said it's a far better place to be post-consolidation than it was before it.

"Sure, structure is not enough," Mullaney said. "It still takes great leadership and great statesmanship to succeed. But if you really want to transform your city, this structure puts great leaders in the position to make that possible."

Amy Reinink can be reached at 352-374-5088 or reinina@gvillesun.com.