Town Government

 

The function of the lowest level of government-the town-is to promote the lifestyle of the majority in order to develop a greater sense  of community in each town. In informational society the town is intended to promote personal relationships to counterbalance the impersonal, competitive institutions outside the town. To the extent that the towns succeeded in creating communities, the metropolitan-town organization would promote economic efficiency, because the residents would participate in many local activities, which would reduce the social costs of transportation.

As was pointed out in Chapter 5, the two powers the town would use to promote the lifestyle of the majority are control over the physical organization of the town and control over activities outside the residences. Under these conditions, households choosing residences would tend to simultaneously create a wide variation in the lifestyles among the various towns and compatible lifestyles within each town, to the extent that households had freedom of location. For example, towns of information workers might well restrict the flow of automobile transportation to promote human interaction, whereas a town in which the majority needed to travel to work would likely maintain a rapid access automobile transportation system. Also, a town of fundamentalist Christians promoting family life would permit very different activities than a town of gays.

The political organization of towns would also vary considerably. Some small towns would be organized as direct democracies with all adults voting on all the issues in the town hall. Larger towns would be more likely to use a form of representative government such as a council and town manager. Since the judicial system is based on judges in law and judges in fact, the economies of scale argument would place the lowest level of courts at the metropolitan government. The great variation in size, political organization, and lifestyles of the large numbers of towns would generate a tremendous variation in the demands for local services.

The metropolitan-town dichotomy would promote the current trend for local governments to use a wide variety of alternative arrangements  for supplying services. To provide local services a town could decentralize the service to private associations or individuals, could produce the service itself, or could buy the service from another government or private firm. In addition, many services could be provided by joint production arrangements between different levels of government or public and private arrangements.

The clause of general benefits, stipulating that government activities should be self-financing if self-financing is efficient, would create incentives for towns to decentralize to associations those activities which are easily self-financed. Although the town would have the power to promote belief systems, including religious beliefs, towns would very seldom use local tax money to fund churches and other institutions promoting belief, because churches have been traditionally financed by the parishioners and the self-financing clause of general benefits would maintain that relationship. In addition, sports and arts and crafts activities would frequently be financed by associations.

Currently city and county governments contract a wide variety of services from private firms. The list includes services associated with many types of public facilities such as the construction, maintenance and sweeping of streets; the construction, operation, and custodial services of community centers; and the construction, operation, and maintenance of recreation facilities such as golf courses. Local governments also contract various types of inspections such as building, mechanical, electrical, health and plumbing. Moreover, private firms sell various types of administrative services to towns such as data entry and processing, tax assessing, and tax and utility billing and processing. In addition, towns purchase professional services such as architectural, auditing, legal, and management consulting. Finally, local governments contract private firms to produce many services such as ambulance, animal control, crime prevention and patrol, fire prevention and suppression, health, landscaping, parking services, and social services.

The development of the metropolitan-town organization and the social nervous system would create incentives for the development of an increasing number of firms producing services for towns. The creation of much smaller towns would create incentives for entrepreneurs to create additional professional services for towns to solve specific technical problems such as recommending the best combination of technical surveillance and human police protection. Moreover, the great increase in the number of towns increases business opportunities by providing a large increase in the number of potential contracts. Finally, the development of the social nervous system and the shift of services to the social nervous system greatly extends the area over which a firm can compete.

In the decision regarding whether to produce or buy the service increasing numbers of towns would opt to use the market mechanism. The efficiency of the market mechanism depends on the number of demanders and suppliers as well as the information policy affecting the participants. With the metropolitan area partitioned into small towns, there would be a large number of demanders and as services shift to the social nervous system, the number of potential suppliers would greatly increase. Thus, many markets for town services with large numbers of suppliers and demanders should approach the conditions of economic efficiency. Under such conditions, some towns would become public counterparts of the hollow corporation, that is the town would have a very small staff arranging all public services as contracts.

To effectively exploit advancing technology, the political economy of the metropolitan area must constantly innovate. For the state and metropolitan government a recommendation was that these governments switch to a separation  strategy for innovation. And given the very large number of local town governments, this strategy would be even more effective for the towns. As was pointed out, the federal government assumes responsibility for research and development, and operational aspects of public services are assigned to the level of government which can provide the service most efficiently. As a consequence, operation of local services would frequently be split between the town and metropolitan governments.

The market for town services would promote active innovation. First, there would be a lot of variation in the production of town services. Some towns might have private fire departments and others public, while still others would buy fire protection from an adjacent town. Towns would also vary considerably on how much they relied on technology. Some might consider crime better controlled by electronics and others by policemen on the beat. Because the town is a small unit, the cost of pilot studies to test such alternatives would be low. Also, using the market creates a natural mechanism for the transmission of new technology into practice. Firms which did not keep up with technology would simply lose business. Moreover, the town manager could shop on the basis of price performance comparisons without having to keep abreast of the technology in all areas of town services. To assist in making such decisions, operational information policy would enable service firms to analyze alternatives and sell evaluation services.

While the metropolitan-town organization should lead to a more efficient delivery of local services satisfying the diverse needs of numerous lifestyles, giving the town the power to support the lifestyle of the majority would raise a fundamental issue of separation of church  and state. Any lifestyle, whether it be secular family life, gay, or fundamentalist Christian, involves both questions of belief and the potential for conflict with rival beliefs. To reduce the conflict one might consider trying to expand the separation of church and state to a concept of separation of belief and state. This approach would create fundamental problems, because even science itself is based on belief. Science like religion cannot be based purely on reason, since, as David Hume  demonstrated, experiments do not satisfy the assumptions for mathematical induction. From a general perspective, then, government cannot be separated from matters of belief. The resolution of this conflict is that governments higher than the lowest level would promote beliefs potentially refutable by experiments and would maintain separation of all beliefs based purely on faith. Beliefs based on faith would include traditional religions, ethical systems and any secular lifestyle. In promoting the lifestyle of the majority, then, towns could promote beliefs based on faith.

A town activity, which illustrates the problem raised by the need to separate nonrefutable beliefs and higher levels of government, is local education. Ideally for local education  to be integrated into the community, primary and secondary education should be under the control of the towns. Advances in technology could will make this decentralization effective. But if local education is to be integrated into the community, local schools would be teaching nonrefutable beliefs as well as simply skills and this would cause a conflict with the separation of nonrefutable beliefs and the state under the condition that any portion of school funding comes from higher levels of government. How these problems can be resolved in a manner which also promotes an effective implementation strategy requires some discussion.

Two aspects of technological advance would enable very small schools to offer diverse, quality education. First, the advance in telecommunications would facilitate remote teaching, thus students would not have to be physically brought to a central location in large groups to achieve a diverse curriculum. Second, the development of educational software in the form of hypermedia, that is interactive voice, text, and image instruction material will enable the student to individually interact with his terminal. As technological forms of education advance, the teacher is freed to individually interact with students to help them select the most appropriate educational materials.

The decentralization scheme based on the assumption that a diverse, quality primary and secondary educational system can be created for a very small group of students, is presented with the caveat that numerous variations in this scheme are needed to empirically test alternative decentralization schemes. As with other multilevel government activities the role of the federal government would be promoting research and development. The role of the state governments would be focused on educational equity and the state research universities. To what extent should funding for education be equalized between poor and rich towns would remain a difficult problem for state governments. The state operational governance over education should be directed at the complex state research universities which would play an essential role in developing new technology and industries, training professionals, and educating the brightest undergraduates.

The metropolitan and district governments would have an expanded educational role. They would be responsible teaching colleges, junior colleges and adult education. The issue of primary and secondary educational performance standards would be decentralized to the metropolitan governments. The metropolitan government as part of its overall economic competitiveness strategy would thus be responsible for the educational quality of the local workforce.

The difficult question regarding decentralization is how much education should be decentralized from the metropolitan level to the town level. To obtain a better implementation strategy for innovation, the operational control of primary and secondary education would be delegated to the towns. This means that the choice of educational materials and curriculum would be determined by the towns. As higher educational performance can be achieved by having the most appropriate educational material for each individual student, selection of educational materials would become the task of the teacher, who would counsel the individual student to select the most appropriate material in the social nervous system. To ensure that all schools achieved at least minimal standards, most metropolitan governments would make the decentralization of administrative control over primary and secondary education conditional on the performance of students on standardized examinations.

Metropolitan governments, generally through public service corporations with appointed or less frequently elected trustees, would provide specialized services such as certain types of labs and other specialized equipment too expensive for most towns to purchase. Some students would go to specialized metropolitan schools and some would travel to specialized schools for short intervals to study a subject in a concentrated manner. Metropolitan teleconferencing would also be promoted for a variety of purposes such as specialized courses for which the demand at each town is insufficient such as special instruction of the gifted, disadvantaged, or students with special interests.

Decentralizing the operational responsibility for primary and secondary education to the towns, would enable the towns to integrate local education into the community lifestyle. In most towns the school system would be part of the local government and local school facilities would be used for multiple purposes day and night. Some towns would integrate before and after day care with their school systems and some would integrate the school athletic facilities into the overall athletic program for all town members. In general, schools would be used at night for adult education and other activities. As towns can promote systems of belief, towns could integrate any type of ethical of religious teaching with their secular education program. Because most states would have some educational funding equalization program in effect and some towns would be receiving research funds from the federal government, the problem of separation of nonrefutable beliefs and higher levels of government must be resolved. This problem should be handled by the concept of experimental precedents of the Constitution. In interpreting the constitution federal judges would establish a variety of precedents applicable in various groups of states. These precedents would vary from strict separation of nonrefutable belief activities from secular education to integration of activities provided the various components were appropriately funded. Over time empirical evidence would modify the precedents in keeping with the extent households had freedom of  location. The greater households have freedom of location, the less need would exist for strict separation of activities.

Besides accommodating local integration of education and separation of nonrefutable beliefs and states, the proposed decentralization scheme would promote the separation strategy for innovation. The great advantage in decentralizing operational control of primary and secondary education to the town, then, would be to obtain much greater variation. Because the variation among the majority of the towns would be much greater than among the metropolitan regions, towns would naturally be prepared to implement a much wider range of alternatives, such as different technological approaches to education. With greater decentralization the federal government in funding new experiments would be more likely to achieve a better experimental design, given the much larger number of towns than metropolitan areas.

The decentralization of local education to smaller, more flexible units should also increase the rate of imitation. With federal government promotion of educational research, private firms and nonprofit organizations would use the advances in knowledge and educational methodology to create a wide variety of competing educational materials available through the social nervous system. Successful innovations would be rapidly imitated because of the creation of a larger number of smaller, more flexible education systems. Imitation can also be increased by having the metropolitan school districts compete for students in teleconferencing  services.

Another empirically testable incentive mechanism to promote competition between alternative educational technology would be to fund primary and secondary education by vouchers allowing parents to select among alternative schools for their children. Parents would have four basic choices for educating their children: the local town school, a school at another physical location, a teleconferencing school through a terminal, or a home school organized by the parents using material available through the social nervous system. Assuming most parents would live in towns supporting their desired lifestyle, most parents would probably send their children to their town school system. But a system of vouchers increases competition because it would mean that a town school system could not automatically assume that most of the children in the town would attend the local school.

Individual