After 30 years--burning impatience.(Commentary)(Reprint)(Column)

Pass the 30-year mark writing the country's first national column focused on state and local government--as I did [in February]--and what do you feel?

My answer: burning impatience.

Here's this magnificent American federal system, a union of states that hold immense original powers, a system perfectly designed for experimentation and innovation.

But instead, we too often seem frozen in time. Just consider our states' basic organization--bicameral state legislatures and independent executive branches.

We've had a century of tumultuous change, domestic and foreign. A century ago, as a widely forwarded e-mail recently noted, the average U.S. life expectancy was 47 years, 8 percent of homes had a telephone, there were 8,000 cars in the U.S., and 144 miles of paved road. Today we're toying with genetic codes to propel lifespans past 100, telephones (land-line or cellular) are ubiquitous, and autos and the roads to serve them dominate our built environment.

Yet in the entire 20th century, only one state--Nebraska--even tried out a unicameral legislature, which can act faster and be less prone to stalemate.

Just check our 50 states' antiquated local government structures. We're fragmented into thousands of local units--cities, townships, villages, boroughs. Many counties still elect coroners and sheriffs and perpetuate a hydra-headed commissioner form of mixed executive-legislative leadership. Many states suffer bitter town-against-town battles for tax-producing industries or chain stores, letting private corporations garner outrageous concessions. Plus, most state governments tightly restrict local governments' taxing powers, denying fundamental self-government to local citizens.

Other nations--Britain and Germany, for example--have reviewed and radically reduced their local government units. But not our states--too politically dangerous, governors and legislatures conclude.

There are many ways states could use their powers more smartly. Big majorities of Americans have poured into metropolitan regions--I call them the modern world's city-states. These regions provide the universities, industries, and legal and financial power that keep state governments solvent, and the nation competitive in global markets.

State legislators too often micromanage their local governments. They'd do a lot better, like smart corporations dealing with subsidiaries, to give regions autonomy and demand performance from them--to make regions, in corporate-speak, the "cash cows" that fill state coffers and in fact subsidize rural areas.

The best way to start: using states' immense legal and grant-making powers to encourage local governments and leadership circles in each region to collaborate across boundaries, perfecting their own strategies for local economic and social progress.

It's true the federal government often shoulders states with huge responsibilities but insufficient cash to deal with them. Vivid current examples are the Medicaid program, which threatens to devour entire state budgets, and the rigid testing requirements of the inadequately funded No Child Left Behind law.

Even so, states' shortcomings are immense. They criminalize drugs and incarcerate so excessively that America has the world's highest imprisonment rate, hitting minorities the hardest--an inexcusable outrage. Too few states have exhibited the courage to experiment, as Maine, Tennessee, Oregon and a few others have tried, with fundamental health system reform.

On taxes, 42 states and the District of Columbia deserve credit for collaborating on a Streamlined Sales Tax Project to reach Internet and mail-order sales. But it's high time states expanded sales tax coverage from consumer goods to services, such as software consulting to law and accounting--fields where the real wealth creation of today's economy is taking place. With income polarization, wealth focused on the top tiers, workers at the bottom struggling, reforms to make state tax codes more progressive are critically needed--but hardly visible.

A number of states are initiating "smart growth" reforms, to undergird their cities and towns and make a first dent on the waves of development consuming forests and farms and exacerbating road congestion and highway costs as commuting distances grow ever longer. But too few are following the pioneering citizen-based visioning approach that Utah has developed, or the focus by today's governors in Massachusetts and Michigan, to mobilize all a state government's departments behind clearly defined rational growth patterns.

Resistance to taxes is a forever-given of state-local government--and up to a point healthy. But for true efficiency, we'd use the dollars governments do raise more effectively. Washington, Iowa, South Carolina, and Michigan are trying "budgeting for outcomes" systems that replace line-item budget tinkering with a dynamic process of defining the results citizens want and defining priority lists of what's affordable.

So there are glimmers of hope--states can make big steps forward, notwithstanding my impatience, or anyone else's. In 1975, I decided writing about the states and cities, and their impact on real peoples' lives, would be more fun and relevant than watching the entrails of Washington politics. I still do.

Copyright[C] 2005, The Washington Post Writers Group. Reprinted with permission. The views expressed in this column are the author's and do not represent the official position of GFOA.

NEAL PEIRCE is a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C. His weekly column, which appears in more than 50 newspapers nationwide, examines trends and innovations in state and local government. E-mail: nrp@citistates.com.

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