Government Congressional Clean Lakes Task Force Assignment

Small Town Civic Structure and Interlocal Collaboration for Public Services

Lois W. Morton∗

Iowa State University

Yu-Che Chen Northern Illinois University

Ricardo S. Morse University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Local governments are responsible for financing and providing an array of public services ranging from police, fire, and emergency medical services to streets, parks, and water. Two mechanisms, civic structure and interlocal collaboration, have the potential to solve the problem of providing high-quality public services in the face of declining resources and increasing needs. We find that civic structure—citizen engagement in solving public problems—is positively and strongly associated with perceived quality of small town public services. Although many rural towns have entered into service agreements with other local governments, this approach is not significantly associated with citizen ratings of overall service quality. Citizens seem to prefer their local government directly providing police services rather than enter- ing into interlocal agreements. This suggests that leaders and heads of departments providing public services need to carefully assess which services are most appropri- ately shared across governments to achieve cost savings and which support sense of community and would be better provided directly.

In an era of globalization and decentralization, leaders of cities and towns are seeking to provide high-quality public services that meet citizen expectations. Globalization has linked even remote rural towns to other places throughout the world and increased the capacity for worldwide communication and technical innovations applied locally (Gieryn, 2000; Flora, Flora, and Fey, 2004). As a result, people can choose to live in rural small towns while engaged in occupations that are not locally bound. The decision where to live is often based on perceptions of the quality of public services (Devereux and Weisbrod, 2006; Kelly, 2005; Sirgy et al., 2000). This is both an opportunity and a challenge to small towns as they try to provide public services that draw new and retain existing residents.

In the United States, devolution of public services has meant local responsibility and mandates for services without sufficient funding (Flora, Flora, and Fey, 2004; Warner,

∗Correspondence should be addressed to Lois Wright Morton, Ph.D, Iowa State University, Department of Sociology, 317C East Hall, Ames, IA 50011; [email protected].

City & Community 7:1 March 2008 C© American Sociological Association, 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005

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CITY & COMMUNITY

2003). Politicians and administrators have attempted to reinvent government by applying the free market competitive system and privatizing public services (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). For many cities, particularly growing affluent suburbs, the competitive model has been effective and they have successfully contracted out many of their services to private vendors (Warner, 2003). However, small rural cities and towns have been less successful in applying this model (Warner and Hefetz, 2003). Rural small towns often lack the tech- nical, managerial, and financial capacities needed to adequately provide the variety of expected public services. In addition, many places do not have private firms and volun- tary organizations that would compete to offer state-of-the-art services at prices lower than local governments (Deller, 1998; Warner and Hefetz, 2003). Thus, rural towns have had to seek other strategies to provide for their residents an infrastructure that meets 21st century needs.

One strategy has been to involve the community in actively volunteering to provide personal time, skills, and financial resources to solve public problems (Almond and Verba, 1989; Flora, Sharp, and Flora, 1997; Morton, 2003a, 2003b; Putnam, 1993, 2000). This internal solution is based in the belief that places with strong civic structure can use this culture to extend limited public resources. A second strategy has been the sharing of capital-intensive services such as public works, equipment, dispatching, and payroll with neighboring municipalities (Collins, 2006; Greenblatt, 2006; Thurmaier and Wood, 2002; Warner, 2003). These interlocal partnerships may provide greater economies of scale, but it is not known to what extent collaborative relationships can meet town residents’ expectations for delivering quality services. Citizen perceptions of quality are important to town governments and may differ from public manager perceptions (Kelly, 2005). Citizen discontent leads to increased complaints about services and affects willingness to pay taxes for public services and decisions to stay or move out of the community (Devereux and Weisbrod, 2006; Lyons, Lowery, and DeHoog, 1992; Simonsen and Robbins, 2003). Are interlocal partnerships an effective and appropriate solution to providing public services as many suggest (Collins, 2006; Deller, 1998; Warner and Hefetz, 2003)? How does the civic structure of place influence citizen perceptions of the quality of their town services? Are places with more interlocal agreements perceived by their citizens to have higher-quality public services?

In this research we examine two relationships—one internal and one external—to discover if they predict how citizens perceive the quality of public services in small com- munities with limited resources and few, if any, private sector options. This knowledge can help guide local government and community leaders in deciding how to better allo- cate scarce resources and tax dollars. We propose that civic structure, an internal mech- anism, influences perceptions of the quality of local infrastructure. Civic structure is a community-level concept consisting of the multiple connections among local people and their voluntary organizations as they seek to work together to solve shared public prob- lems. There is evidence that places with higher levels of civic structure are better able to solve specific community infrastructure problems (Warren, 2001; Morton, 2003a, 2003b; Morton et al., 2005). The second relationship we explore is the formal external collabora- tions created between and among neighboring local governments to coprovide services. These interlocal agreements emerge from managerial connections and networks among local governments (Thurmaier and Wood, 2002).

These are two distinct—but not necessarily mutually exclusive—pathways. The civic structure approach represents the connections among individuals, organizations, and

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government within the community that are focused on the overall community interest (Morton 2003a, 2003b). Collaborations and partnerships between and among local gov- ernments are external relationships usually initiated by public officials and staff for specific services (Thurmaier and Wood, 2002). These external relationships are often horizontal (fire department to fire department; police department to police department) but can also be vertical to the region and state (Agranoff and McGuire, 2003). Further, one rural town may execute a formal agreement with a neighboring municipality or county for a particular service but look to a different jurisdiction for a collaborative agreement on a different service (Thurmaier and Wood, 2002).

In this article, we first apply theories of civic structure and external collaboration among communities to citizen views of service quality and infrastructure. Then we describe our methodology for testing these two concepts in 99 rural Iowa municipalities. After our findings are presented, implications and their applications for elected officials, community leaders, and city department staff are offered.

CIVIC STRUCTURE

Civic structure is the complex social relations within and across institutions whose focus is community benefit (Morton, 2003b). In cities and towns, these social relations evidence themselves in the public domain when citizens and groups they have created attempt to work through solving local problems such as the provision of public services. This citizen problem solving requires a shared sense of community, some level of trust, and a willingness to negotiate for the common good.

Civic structure draws from literatures on civil society, civicness, democracy, and com- munity (Almond and Verba, 1989; Morton, 2003a, 2003b; Putnam, 1993, 2000; Warren, 2001). This concept integrates insights from these bodies of literature with a focus on the importance of social structure of place, citizen participation, and the underlying patterns of interactions as the foundation for solving problems facing the community as a whole. Civil society is defined by Hall (1995:15) as “. . . the self-organization of strong and au- tonomous groups that balance the state.” He qualifies this by requiring the groups to be voluntary and overlapping in order to be “civil.” Civic structure builds on the idea of “civil” by including voluntary groups as a core concept. However, civic structure is distinct from civil society in that it is a social structure of place where individual actions and dynamic group networks interact to address shared concerns in the public domain. Whereas civil society is a larger global, less-specified concept that is used to represent groups at a num- ber of levels (local, regional, state, nation) and does not necessarily have problem solving as a goal.

The term “civic” pertains to citizens and their actions in a particular geographic place. Implicit in being a citizen are rights and responsibilities directed to place. Orum and Gramlich (1999) similarly use “civic” in their work on civic capital and specify that it has clear boundaries and ties to place. Almond and Verba (1989) apply “civic” to culture and conceptualize it as attitudes that are supportive of a democratic political system. Further, they propose civic culture as a sense of identity among citizens with attitudes toward oneself as a participant in their government and expectations regarding governmental outputs and performance (Almond and Verba, 1989). This participation is driven by a sense of community and citizenship values (Couto, 1999).

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Cities and towns differ in the amount of civicness they possess (Wagner, 2004). Wag- ner (2004, p.157) finds that places “. . . with more civic capital are better able to make quality of life decisions than cities with less civic capital.” In his research, civic capital is measured by organization creation rate and rate of voter turnout in Presidential elections over time. Orum and Gramlich (1999) propose four dimensions of civic capital: alliances among key economic, political, and social sectors; vision; citizens’ commitment to the place where they live; and bridging mechanisms that connect citizens to key community sectors. Capital denotes the accumulation of resources that can be stored and applied in a civic way.

“Structure” in our research is used to represent a set of organizational patterns, bu- reaucracies, and formal organizations and their relationships that are a characteristic of place (Young, 1999). Structure is about the form, not the content (Young, 1999). The word “civic” is what gives the content meaning to structure. When combined, “civic” and “structure” describe a place-based characteristic of community that “. . . consists of norma- tive expectations that multiple individual and group actions will lead to solving collective problems in the broad community interest” (Morton, 2003b). Civic structure extends the idea of citizen engagement in the public realm to a community-level attribute (for a more complete theoretical discussion of civic structure and distinctions of social capital see Morton, 2003b).

The complexity of communities, even small ones, requires an effective governance model that includes engaging citizens (Epstein et al., 2006). The participation of citizens and the civic structure they build as they iteratively engage each other around shared public issues enables government to reflexively provide for and fund mandates and self- determined services. Citizen participation can range from engaging in public dialogues to negotiate solutions, to a willingness to vote for taxes for services they deem important, to voluntary efforts to invest personal and organizational time, skills, and resources in support of public services. The relationship between civic structure and perceptions of quality of public services is based, in part, on the concept that superior community out- comes require networks, trust, and norms of reciprocity among groups and individuals in the community (Flora et al., 1997; Morton, 2003b). A civic structure provides forums for differing opinions and alternative solutions to be voiced, mobilization of resources, and permeable community boundaries (Flora et al., 1997). Flora (1998, p. 499) writes that “. . . communities that desire to engage in community betterment must seek broad involvement and should focus on community-wide outcomes.”

Orum and Gramlich (1999) suggest that cities’ inability to create favorable outcomes may be associated with an absence of commitment of city residents. Community iden- tity and sense of belonging to the place where one lives have implications for commit- ment to place. Lack of commitment may be the result of a weak sense of community identity and/or missing social connections among local citizens and groups and organi- zations. Davidson and Cotter (1993) discuss the positive relationship between a strong psychological sense of community and public service outcomes such as raising revenues for public schools. They find that sense of community “exerts a considerable impetus for involvement and participation in community affairs” (Davidson and Cotter, 1993, p. 60).

Taken together these literatures suggest that people who live in places with strong civic structure will perceive they have high-quality services because they have engaged their community in the problem of public services and how to best provide them.

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INTERLOCAL COLLABORATION

In many places, community leaders and government service departments have built re- lationships with other governmental agencies to solve small town infrastructure needs (Collins, 2006; Greenblatt, 2006; Rhodes, 1996). These relationships usually extend be- yond town borders to neighboring local governments and other social and political entities. Partnerships and collaborations among local governments can be informal or formal. In this research, we examine formal intergovernmental connections and the asso- ciation of these external relationships with resident perceptions of public service quality.

Government is the mechanism that cities and small towns use to make communal deci- sions about services that benefit everyone (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). Thus the general purpose of local government is to provide a wide range of services, making budgetary decisions on use of community funds and policies that have implications for the living and working conditions of people in that town (Epstein et al., 2006). The role of govern- ment begins with defining public problems and then finding the resources to solve those problems (Epstein et al., 2006; Osborne and Gaebler, 1992).

Although federal and state governments devolved and decentralized responsibilities in recent years, they did not provide funding mechanisms for local units (Flora, Flora, and Fey, 2004; Warner, 2003). This has left many rural municipalities dependent on their local tax structure to finance services. Sources of revenues are sales taxes, property taxes, surcharges for city services, and direct billing for services such as water and garbage collection. Minimum services small rural towns are expected to offer include street main- tenance, fire protection, fire and emergency response services, water, park maintenance, and waste/garbage pickup, and/or public disposal places. Rural towns that are not adja- cent to metro areas have found it difficult to raise revenues even as they simultaneously experience higher per capita costs due to lower population densities (Warner, 1998).

Local governments have utilized three options, usually in combination, for providing public services: (1) direct services, (2) contracts with private and voluntary organizations, and (3) collaborations with other government entities. However, contracting with private and voluntary organizations is not a viable option for many rural localities (Deller, 1998; Warner, 2003). Warner notes, “Competition through decentralization and privatization has left rural governments at a disadvantage. . . . Rural areas are less attractive to private suppliers, so local governments must create public markets based on intergovernmental cooperation to achieve efficiency” (Warner, 2003, p. 258). Rural governments have moved to intergovernmental contracting to achieve the economies of scale that competition was expected to bring to larger urban cities (Flora, Flora, and Fey, 2004; Warner and Hefetz, 2003).

For cooperation and collaborations among municipalities and other local governments to take place, the benefits must outweigh the costs such as loss of autonomy and “turf” (Mattessich and Monsey, 1998). Impetus for these interlocal agreements include lower per capita costs when service provisions are shared and the ability to purchase higher-quality services at a shared, lower cost (Thurmaier and Chen, 2005). Collaborative management of public services is multilevel ranging from vertical relations with state and federal agencies to horizontal collaborations with other local governments, agencies, and organizations (Agranoff and McGuire, 2003). Horizontal collaborations include resource exchanges, project-based work, and policymaking (Agranoff and McGuire, 2003). Collaborative ac- tivities among small towns may be a loose networking partnership, a simple low/no cost

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agreement to cooperate, or a strong long-term formal agreement that requires a signifi- cant commitment of resources (Cigler, 1999). The coprovision of public services between small towns almost always is a long-term formal agreement that commits specific, public resources.

Agreements between jurisdictions are “. . . organized, maintained, and operated volun- tarily by public service professionals” (Frederickson and Smith, 2003, p. 223). Thus, while the civic structure of a rural town is used to identify the need for specific public services; it is more often the public service department heads and staff that initiate and carry out the intergovernmental agreement. The success of these collaborations depends on those relationships. The quality of these relationships and the professional expertise of the man- ager affect the quality of public services provided. An added complication is that service quality is a matter of citizens’ perception. A highly rated service by public managers is not necessarily rated the same way by citizens (Kelly, 2005). Local governments are elected by and responsible to represent their citizens’ preferences. Governments and their staff often assume that devising efficient economic solutions to assure provision of services would be citizen preferences. Empirical evidence is lacking regarding whether citizens perceive that interlocal agreements will result in their expected quality of services.

RESEARCH DESIGN

Civic structure and interlocal agreement strategies are not expected to be mutually exclu- sive mechanisms for solving the problem of providing community services. They both are likely to be present in rural towns. Much of the literature on devolution of services has focused on economic solutions to improve actual quality of services rather than citizen perceptions. Public administrators must deal with both actual quality and citizen percep- tions and often make the assumption that they are the same. Advocates of regionalism and intergovernmental contracts have assumed that effective leadership will overcome barri- ers to intergovernmental cooperation (Merrill and Malmer, 2003). Interlocal agreements are used as a proxy for level of actual service. However, there are no literatures that offer empirical guidance as to whether the number of agreements reflects citizen perception of quality. Two hypotheses are proposed:

(1) small rural cities and towns with high civic structure will also have higher levels of perceived quality of public services;

(2) the greater the number of interlocal agreements that small rural cities and towns have entered into, the more likely residents will rate their government services highly.

The state of Iowa has a code known as Chapter 28E that provides for the joint exercise of governmental powers including agreements to coprovide public services. The prevalence of 28E agreements among Iowa cities, rural towns, and other governmental jurisdictions over the past 10 years (1993–2003), combined with a stratified random sample of rural towns and cities, provides a natural experiment to explore these hypotheses.

Iowa 28E agreements are formal and filed with the Secretary of State and recorded with the county recorder. Thus, they are public records. In this research, paper-based infor- mation about these agreements were coded and entered into a comprehensive electronic database of over 11,000 agreements. Data on the social organization of small cities and

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towns and their perceptions of public service quality are drawn from a 2004 survey of 99 randomly selected small Iowa towns (500 to 10,000 population, not adjacent to a metropoli- tan area of 50,000 people or more). Communities with less than 500 are excluded because basic city services are typically unavailable. Within each community, 150 households were randomly selected from directories in each town. Within households, adult heads and coheads were randomly chosen by gender. Questionnaires were mailed, followed by two additional mailings using the Dillman (2000) method. Overall response rate was 67 per- cent (average range of response rates per town were 47–81 percent). Total number of respondents was 9,962. (See http://www.soc.iastate.edu/rdiweb/ for additional details on the survey methodology.) All towns selected for the survey are matched with the 28E agreement database of interlocal agreements from 1993 to 2003.

CIVIC STRUCTURE MEASURES

A measure of civic structure is created using the concepts community benefit, trust, citizen and organizational participation in public issues, and shared sense of community. Eight items are used to create a summated scale (Table 1). The summated scale has a reliability alpha of 0.81. Nunnally (1978) recommends a minimum alpha of 0.70. The first two items, “when something needs to be done in (name of town) the whole community usually gets behind it” and “clubs and organizations in (name of community) are interested in what is best for all residents,” are items used by Morton (2003b) in a four-item index of civic structure. These are indicators of community benefit, sense of community, and citizen and organizational participation in public issues.

The global statement, “when important community issues arise most people in (com- munity name) are willing to express their opinions publicly” indicates the extent to which people in the community engage in public dialogues about issues that affect the com- munity. This statement contains citizen participation, the sense of community, and some level of trust that it is safe to express viewpoints in public. It is important to note that the sense of a problem affecting the community does not imply agreement on how it is

TABLE 1. Civic Structure Relationships Within Iowa Small Towns (2004) N = 99 Towns

Variable Mean (SD)

1. When something needs to be done in (name of town) the whole community usually gets behind it

3.33 (0.99)

2. Clubs and organizations in (name of community) are interested in what is best for all residents

3.54 (0.90)

3. When important community issues arise most people in (name of community) are willing to express their opinions publicly

3.47 (0.93)

4. The involvement of youth in community projects is encouraged in (name of town) 3.58 (0.91) 5. Residents in (name of community) are receptive to new residents taking leadership positions 3.13 (0.96) 6. Disadvantaged groups such as those with low income rarely get involved in community

projects (reverse coded) 2.63 (0.96)

7. People in (name of community) trust their elected officials 3.34 (0.93) 8. People in (name of community) look out mainly for what’s best for their friends and family

and are not much concerned about the welfare of other local people (reverse coded) 3.11 (1.01)

Civic structure index (eight items) reliability alpha = 0.81 possible range 8–40 26.14 (4.97)

Strongly agree = 5, Agree = 4, Neither agree or disagree = 3, Disagree = 2, Strongly disagree = 1.

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resolved. Thus a public dialogue may not be conflict-free but a strong civic structure in place provides space for differences to be publicly discussed and negotiated. This global statement is supported by three additional items—the involvement of youth, new resi- dents, and low-income residents—and captures the degree of community openness to a diversity of opinions from distinct segments of the population. These items represent the kind of citizens that might participate in public issues, the degree to which different residents believe they have public issues in common with other community members, and the level of trust that differing opinions can be publicly expressed.

The seventh item asks about the trust citizens have in their public-elected officials. Trust among citizens and their elected representatives is critical to public dialogue and decision making about the allocation of public resources and infrastructure. The last item asks respondents to evaluate the extent to which personal welfare versus public welfare dominates their view of community—whether there is any sense of common shared welfare within the community.

INTERLOCAL AGREEMENTS

The Iowa Code Chapter 28E identifies specific and general powers that governments have in creating joint agreements. These powers include unified law enforcement, emergency services, revenue-sharing community clusters, and local bond financing related to fire and school districts. The joint exercise of powers is broad:

Any power or powers, privileges or authority exercised or capable of exercise by a public agency of this state may be exercised and enjoyed jointly with any other public agency of this state having such power or privilege or authority and jointly with any public agency of any other state or of the United States to the extent that laws of such other state or of the United States permit such joint exercise of enjoyment. (http://www.legis.state.ia.us/IACODE/2003/28E/3.html retrieved 2/2/06)

Further, public agencies may enter into the agreement including the creation of a separate entity to carry out the purpose of the agreement. “Appropriate action by ordinance, resolution or otherwise pursuant to law of the governing bodies involved shall be necessary before any such agreement may enter into force” (http://www.legis.state.ia.us/IACODE/ 2003/28E/4.html, accessed 2/14/07). The agreements can be between governmental units at local, state, and federal levels with at least one of them an Iowa government.

To test the intergovernmental collaboration hypothesis, numbers of formal 28E agree- ments among municipalities from 1993 to 2003 are used as measures of interlocal collab- oration. The 99 small towns in this study have engaged in a total of 382 28E agreements. With few exceptions, all agreements are between a small town and one or many other local governments (such as city or county). These agreements represent 23 different service categories with an average of 3.5 agreements per town (Table 2). Over half of these agree- ments are for joint police services (32.5 percent) and joint fire/EMS response (22.9 per- cent). When added with two other categories—water, sanitation and waste (11.7 percent), and street and road systems (9.6 percent)—more than three-quarters of the agreements fall into four of the 23 categories. Thirty-one communities had no 28E agreements, 63 com- munities had one to three, and five communities had 11 or more agreements during this 11-year period.

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TABLE 2. Descriptive Statistics N = 99 Towns (Populations Less than 10,000)

Mean (SD) Range

Perceptions of government services quality (2004)a 2.8 (0.21) 2.14–3.28 Civic structure index (2004)b 26.10 (1.35) 22.69–28.93 Number interlocal agreements for services (1993–2003)c 3.50 (5.92) 0–39 Mean age in communities 56.69 (2.91) 49–63 years Mean education in communities 3.97 (0.30) 3.35–5.07 Mean income in communities 4.41 (0.49) 3.33–5.67 aQuality of government services 2004 “Please rate overall quality of government services in (name of community) 1 = poor; 2 = fair; 3 = -good; 4 = very good.” Do not know and do not receive the services responses were dropped. bCivic structure index eight items summated scale possible range 8–40 reliability alpha = 0.81 (see Table 1 for list of items). cNumber of interlocal agreements for services (1993–2003 Iowa 28E agreements filed with the state for joint provision of services).

PERCEPTIONS OF GOVERNMENT SERVICES QUALITY

Citizen perception of local government service quality is the dependent variable and mea- sured by rating the “overall quality of government services” on a 1 to 4 scale with 1 = poor, 2 = fair, 3 = good, and 4 = very good. Small town respondents’ perceptions of the quality of their government services ranged from fair (2.14) to good (3.28) and, on average, rated their government services 2.8. A global indicator, satisfaction with govern- ment, is used by Sirgy et al. (2000) in their method for assessing residents’ satisfaction with community-based services and quality of life. They hypothesize and find empirical support for using global satisfaction with government as a proxy for satisfaction with in- dividual government services. Although our research focus is perceptions of quality not satisfaction with services, we similarly find that our global measure of quality perceptions is highly significant when correlated with perceptions of quality for specific government services: police protection (R = 0.613), condition of streets (R = 0.688), condition of parks (R = 0.746), water (R = 0.361), fire protection (R = 0.654), garbage collection (R = 0.504), and emergency response (R = 0.612).

CONTROL VARIABLES

Four control variables are included in our analysis: population of town in year 2000, average town-respondent age, education, and income. Although the population range (500–10,000) of small rural towns is already truncated by the survey methodology, it is still expected that town size would affect capacity to provide quality public services. Smaller populated towns must tax at a higher rate to provide similar services of larger places, losing the advantage of economies of scale. It is important to control for this to deter- mine if perceptions of quality come from civic structure, number of intergovernmental agreements, or simply the ability to generate more revenues and pay for higher quality and more services. Variations in the demographic characteristics of these 99 rural towns are not high (Table 2) and differences in age, education, and income are not expected to influence perceptions of the quality of government services.

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FINDINGS

Civic structure and number of interlocal agreements along with control variables are placed in three regression models to determine associations with the overall quality of government services (Table 3). There is a strong, significant, and positive zero-order correlation between civic structure and overall perceived quality of government services. Prior to the addition of other variables, it accounts for 31 percent of the variance. The second model adds the variable, number of interlocal agreements, and increases the model’s power to an adjusted R2 = 0.355. The final model adds the four control variables and yields an adjusted R2 = 0.405.

Civic structure is positive with the largest and most significant coefficient. This signif- icance holds in all three models and the coefficient becomes larger with the addition of control variables. This provides support for hypothesis one that rural towns with high civic structure are more likely to give higher overall ratings of local government service quality. In the second model, the number of interlocal agreements is positive and signif- icant with a smaller coefficient than civic structure. However, with the addition of town population, this significance disappears. This is evidence that hypothesis two (the more interlocal agreements a rural town has, the greater the likelihood that respondents will rate overall quality of government services higher) is not supported and seems to be an artifact of increasing town size. It may be that larger towns can afford professional, managerial staff who, in turn, utilize their professional relationships and networks to move their town into interlocal agreements. More research is needed to explore this relationship.

The control variable population size in 2000 is significant as expected. Rural towns with larger populations are more likely to rate the overall quality of government services higher than small towns with less resources. Larger towns have more human, social, and financial resources with which to provide public services than smaller ones. The three demographic controls, average age, average education, and average income, are not sig- nificant. U.S. Census data confirm that these rural Iowa towns are more similar than different demographically.

TABLE 3. Civic Structure and Interlocal Collaboration in Rural Towns N = 99 Towns (Population Less than 10,000)

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Beta Beta Beta

Civic structure 0.566∗∗∗ 0.569∗∗∗ 0.607∗∗∗ Number interlocal agreements 0.219∗∗ 0.126 NS Town population 2000 0.246∗∗ Mean town age 0.114 NS Mean town education 0.093 NS Mean town income −0.027 NS

Adjusted R2 0.313 0.355 0.405

Dependent variable = perceptions of overall quality of government services in (name of community).∗∗∗p < 0.001.∗∗p < 0.01.∗p < 0.05. #p < 0.10.

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PERCEPTIONS OF SMALL TOWN SERVICE QUALITY BY TYPE OF SERVICE DELIVERY

The intent of interlocal agreements is the sharing of costs, shifting some of the tax bur- den away from residents as economies of scale are achieved. This should result in less cost and greater capacity to offer higher-quality services. However, we find that number of agreements does not predict citizen perceptions of quality with public services. This sug- gests that government staff assumptions that interlocal agreements solve both economic concerns and citizen expectations may be in error. To better understand why the number of interlocal agreements is not significant, agreements by service category are explored (Table 4). Perceptions of quality for four major government services (police, streets, fire, and emergency medical services [EMS]) are examined using the civic structure and con- trol variables used in Model 3 of Table 3. The number of interlocal agreements variable is replaced by a dichotomous variable that represents presence of agreements specific to that public service (1) or no interlocal agreement (0). For example, two different in- terlocal agreement service categories, police services and jail services, are modeled to predict perceptions of police services quality (Table 4). Civic structure is significant and positive in both models providing evidence that it contributes to citizen perceptions of quality with police services. While interlocal police agreements (−0.259∗∗) and interlocal jail agreements (0.175#) both significantly predict quality perceptions of police services, it is important to note they are in different directions. Thirty-nine towns have interlocal police agreements; fifty-seven provide police service directly. Police agreements are most often police protection such as patrol, pursuit, traffic, tickets, crowd control, and park- ing. In some instances police agreements also include 911, detectives, crime labs, record checks, drug enforcement, and/or prisoner transfers, and juveniles.

Our findings show higher citizen perceptions of quality with police services that are di- rectly provided rather than those that are provided through interlocal agreements (which most often involve the small town contracting with the county sheriff’s office). This seems to support a common conception that police services are among the most difficult in terms of interlocal cooperation (Governor’s Center for Local Government Services, 2002). A

TABLE 4. Perceptions of Small Town Services Quality by Service Delivery Category N = 99 Towns

Quality of Police Services

Quality of Quality of Quality of Police Jail Streets Fire Service EMS

Civic structure 0.188∗ 0.214∗∗ 0.445∗∗∗ 0.493∗∗∗ 0.417∗∗∗ Interlocal agreements for −0.259∗∗ aa 0.175# bb −0.061 NS cc −0.020 NS dd −0.055 NS ee

specific service categorya

Town population 2000 0.446∗∗∗ 0.569∗∗∗ 0.248∗ 0.138 NS 0.027 NS Mean town age 0.175 NS 0.272∗ −0.132 NS 0.044 NS 0.063 NS Mean town education 0.209# 0.198NS −0.063 NS −0.322∗∗ −0.125 NS Mean town income 0.018 NS −0.029NS −0.077 NS 0.109 NS 0.071 NS Adjusted R2 0.424 0.402 0.205 0.208 0.118 aInterlocal agreement = 1; no service, contract with private service, or direct service = 0. Specific service category of interlocal agreement: aa = police services; bb = jail services; cc = road services; dd = fire service; ee = ambulance service.∗∗∗p < 0.001.∗∗p < 0.01.∗p < 0.05. #p < 0.10.

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strong ethos in small towns for local self-governance seemingly builds a natural resistance to having police services in particular controlled outside the community. A recent survey of South Lyon, Michigan, exemplifies this notion. Eighty percent of residents favored shared service arrangements for parks and libraries and cultural activities but preferred local control for police and fire services (Crumm, 2006).

However, jail agreements with other agencies modestly predict quality perceptions of police services. We do not have data on where the jail is located (in the study town or with the town or county the agreement is with) but residents may feel safer with arrested and jailed persons being located out-of-town and thus support between town agreements.

In the other three service areas (streets, fire, and EMS), the models predict 12 to 21 percent of the variance, much smaller in comparison to police service perceptions. Civic structure is significant across all service areas. However, specific interlocal agreements do not significantly predict perceptions of quality. This indicates no preference between town agreements for these services and direct provision. This may be because many of the towns directly provide these services rather than contract with other towns.

Some services seem to be more closely connected to citizens’ sense of community and perhaps safety and local control. In models (not shown) using direct services in place of the interlocal agreement variable, we find that direct service provision significantly predict perceptions of quality with police, streets, and EMS but not fire services. These findings are consistent with the conventional wisdom that resistance to interlocal approaches to service delivery is tied to fear of loss of control and threats to community identity. Thus, services and facilities more connected to community identity like police and schools are assumed to be harder to cooperate on while others (possibly fire protection) are easier.

Harvey (2003, p. 8) describes “the loss of control issue” as becoming “enmeshed in turf protection. This can be due to the concern over loss of community identity when joint provision arrangements are executed, or a fear of the loss of sense of community.” While this view is widely cited among practitioners we find empirical support lacking (Collins, 2006; Merrill and Malmer, 2003; White, 2002). Our results suggest the salience of this phenomenon, but clearly this is an area that needs further empirical exploration.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The purpose of municipal government is to provide an organizational structure to meet community needs, to raise and allocate revenues in support of those needs, and to offer citizens a direct opportunity to participate in and guide the provision of the public good (Flora, Flora, and Fey, 2004). Gieryn’s (2000, p. 466) discussion of space and place reminds us that “place is not merely a setting or backdrop, but an agentic player in the game— a force with independent effects on social life.” Variations in the social, financial, and managerial resources across cities and towns produce differences in the capacities of small cities and towns to provide adequate and high-quality public services.

Perceptions of service quality matter when rural town leaders make decisions about public resources. Perceptions influence residents’ complaints about services and decisions to stay or exit their community (Devereux and Weisbrod, 2006; Kelly, 2005). This can also translate into a willingness to pay for public services in general through taxes (Kelly, 2005). On the other hand, research has found that dissatisfaction with local government services translates into a variety of citizen responses that should be of concern to small towns: exit

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(leaving jurisdiction), voice (complaining), loyalty (trust, or lack thereof, in government), or neglect (apathy toward government) (Lyons et al., 1992).

Governments are elected by their citizens to represent their interests. However, public manager assumptions and decisions about how to provide for quality police, fire, EMS, and street services may not be congruent with perceived quality of those services. This po- tential discrepancy probably stems from several sources. First, citizens may not subscribe to the same set of performance measures as those subscribed to by city administrators. A recent effort to bridge this gap is to increase the citizens’ involvement in the development of performance measures (Ho and Coates, 2004). Second, citizens may have a preference over an arrangement of public service provision that strengthens a sense of community. For instance, citizens in a small town may prefer to have police services solely provided by their city as the visibility of the town logo on police cars may provide a strong men- tal confirmation of their town identity than patrol cars with a near-by county’s logo on them. The final source is the subjective basis used by citizens in forming their expecta- tion. Citizens may rate a public service of a small town poorly simply because they have experienced a much higher level of public service quality in a near-by city or county and use that as the basis for comparison. Kelly (2005, p. 79) coined this as a “public-sector product comparability” issue.

The dilemma that local governments face is how to provide quality services in an eco- nomically efficient manner while assuring citizen perception of service quality. This is not just a public relations and communication issue but may also be a disjuncture be- tween what government managers and what citizens think is important. Decisions based on economic efficiency alone may not meet citizen expectations. Thus, service provision agreements must balance the economics with perceptions of social and cultural appro- priateness. More research is needed to understand the relationship between actual and perceived quality of services.

Wagner (2004) asks why some city governments are able to improve the quality of life for citizens while others do not. In our research, we find that the civic structure of rural towns does influence residents’ expressions regarding the quality of their government services. However, we find that formal interlocal collaborative partnerships, while touted as a solution to efficient service provision and an attempt to extend town resources, may not meet citizen public infrastructure expectations. Our civic structure findings suggest that governments that create stronger linkages between their civic structure and their administrative decision makers could close the gap between citizen perceptions and the manner in which actual services are provided.

For the interlocal collaborative approach to achieve the promise of meeting citizen expectations, local government leaders and town department decision makers need to consider which services are best directly provided and which can be contracted out. Pub- lic safety seems to be highly salient and perceived and/or actual quality may be the result of knowing the town has dedicated police resources to maintain safety. The salience of directly provided EMS services may be influenced by an aging-in-place rural population with health concerns. Sense of community is particularly important to residents of small communities, thus the tensions between when to directly provide services versus when to collaborate and coprovide services must not threaten this view of sharing problems and solutions. Sense of community, trust, and striving for a common good are rural strengths when they build a strong civic structure. Schools, fire departments, and libraries can con- tribute to community identity. However, financial stress and limitations on town ability

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to raise revenues have forced many local governments to seek collaborative agreements (Greenblatt, 2006). For agreements to happen, these interlocal service-sharing arrange- ments must not only be financially desirable but also reinforce community ownership. Thus dispatching and back office services that coordinate and supplement functions rather than replace services might be better choices (EMS, police, fire).

In a separate analysis, an interaction term between civic structure and interlocal agree- ments was created but found not significant. This suggests that these two areas do not currently influence or interact with each other. There may be community benefit in broad- ening the community knowledge about how interlocal collaboration benefits citizens and using the civic structure to garner support. Each rural town that considers coprovision of services needs to balance their social, political, cultural, and financial characteristics in deciding which services and to what extent they are shared with which neighboring town.

It is noteworthy that the addition of town size makes number of interlocal agreements nonsignificant. Town population is used as a control proxy for resources, management capacity, and other factors that respond to scale. While our research does not posit the re- lationships between town size and interlocal agreements, this would be a fruitful direction for future exploration.

This research has a number of limitations. First, only Iowa rural towns were examined. U.S. rural towns vary in their structures and cultures as well as the state policies and laws that govern them. It would be important to also look at rural towns in western, eastern, and southern regions as well as by individual states. Second, we have primarily examined the number of agreements with less attention to the type of agreement and the length of time that collaboration has been in place. Future research would benefit from additional separate analyses of categories of public services that are frequently shared such as fire, EMS, and police.

Another aspect of coprovision of services is the power relations or equality in which resources are shared. Towns may not always be able to share equally financing and ser- vice provision; yet unequal formal agreements may lead to social and political unease. Future work should evaluate the effects of sharing among affluent and significantly less- affluent towns. Additionally, rural towns vary in their staffing; some have full-time clerks, department heads, and professional city managers, others do not. It would be expected that increased technical and professional expertise within the town government would improve the efficiencies and quality of services offered. Another limitation of this study is the focus on formal agreements that these small cities have with other local governments. These 28E agreements represent a high level of formal cooperation between communities. However, there could be informal agreements that exist for the same purpose. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the formal agreements represent the “tip of the iceberg” of inter- local cooperation. Further study should look at the extent to which small rural cities use informal as opposed to formal agreements.

While the argument has been made that regionalism is localism’s logical extension (Briffault, 2000), there remain many barriers to coprovision of services across multiple government units. It would seem that local governments could leverage their civic struc- ture in ways that help citizens realize they are part of a region as well as locality and their best interests could be advanced when local resources are selectively, but mutually, shared across the region.

In conclusion, the social organization—the civic structure—of small towns is impor- tant in explaining resident perceptions of public services quality. It signals that citizens

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are engaged in solving the problems of their community and willing to invest personal and public resources. Further, this satisfaction can give a rural town a competitive advan- tage in retaining current and enticing new residents. Rural towns that chose interlocal agreements for service delivery should consider how to balance projected economies of scale and efficiencies with residents’ perceptions of quality of those services. This means that they might selectively choose nonvisible, routine portions of public services to share while directly providing those services that seem most important to their residents. Or, alternatively, they might consider how service-sharing arrangements might be more sen- sitive to community identity/control issues that fall outside professional understandings of effectiveness and efficiency.

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