This situation as to the actual political Boston is confusing enough. Metropolitan Boston on the other hand, comprises thirty-nine municipalities situated in five counties, which make up a compact community of a million five hundred thousand inhabitants. These centers have every facility for communication and transportation. And the state has indeed recognized the unity of the district by establishing such agencies of administration as the metropolitan park commission and the metropolitan water and sewer board.
San Francisco has proceeded so far as to have a single governing body and a single set of fiscal officers for city and county.
With this, the recital of actual accomplishments toward formal consolidation is about complete. The advantages of consolidation as they appear to a disinterested observer are obvious. But the process is usually difficult in the extreme, especially as it relates to the equitable distribution of assets and liabilities of the parts to be consolidated. New York City only accomplished this by assuming the debts of the outlying counties and municipalities. But in the course of nineteen years not even that generous concession has sufficed to the vigorous local spirit of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Richmond.
FEDERATION
Where immediate consolidation at a single stroke is out of the question, as is apparently almost always the case, a more easy transition is suggested by the recommendations of the City and County Government Association of Alameda County, California. Realizing that a powerful local sentiment in the outlying territory militated irresistibly against annexation to the city of Oakland or, in fact, any form of complete organic union of the municipalities in the county, this Association has proposed as the logical first step to a more economically organized county, a plan of federation.
ORGANIZATION CHART
For the City and County of Alameda and its Boroughs as Proposed in the Tentative Charter Submitted by the City and County Government Association
SKETCH of PROPOSED CITY and COUNTY of ALAMEDA SHOWING PROPOSED BOROUGHS
Under the proposed plan the governing body would consist of one councillor from each of twenty-one districts. Unlike the present board of supervisors in Alameda County, the new body would have only legislative functions. The functions of the county, as a public corporation, would be broadened to include a number of interests which the municipalities are conceived to have in common. Police protection, for instance, would revert from the cities back to the county, where it was originally lodged, on the theory that crime thrives in a certain social and physical environment and knows nothing and cares less for corporate limits. And inasmuch also as the ravages of fire and disease are the interests of a territory rather than the corporate boundaries of a city, the control of these perils would also be transferred to the county. The installation of the plan would also result in the abolishment of the dual system of tax assessment and tax collection. To the smaller units would be left jurisdiction over their more distinctively local affairs such as public works. The identity of the individual cities, which would be known as “boroughs,” would thus remain intact, for they would retain their local governing bodies to frame strictly local policies. At the same time the general organization of the local government would provide for the common interests of the constituent members.