"Regional Stewardship" and the "Campaign for Greater Louisville"

This page focuses on providing access to the voluminous literature on consolidation of regional governments and associated power structure transformations.  Unfortunately, much of the initial research in these areas associated with the People's Agenda archives has been lost, but attempts will be made to add materials here over time.

In Louisville, merger efforts dating back to the middle of the twentieth century led to the decades long, massively funded corporate "Campaign for Greater Louisville" which culminated in passage of the  merger referendum in 2000.  With the exception of Kansas City in 1997, no first class city mergers had succeed in the US for nearly thirty years.  The Louisville merger consolidation campaign failures in the late seventies and early eighties led to several decades of metropolitan governance under  a variety of "work around" deals. Efforts to coordinate regional services and power brokering led to the growth of numerous quasi-public and public-private agreements and agencies, such as the City-County Compact and "Greater Louisville Incorporated" (GLI), which functionally (and in some cases physically) merged the Chamber of Commerce into local government policy agencies as the contractor in charge of most regional economic development activities.  The City-County compact provided a framework for agencies to work across boundaries, and GLI allowed the Chamber of Commerce to effectively take over many of the economic development functions of local government.   GLI arranged for half of the mayor's salary to be paid from private funds in the years leading up to merger, and under the slogan of "unity," the newly consolidated government established a "strong mayor - weak council" form of governance, ensuring that one leader and one public sector agenda would prevail.

The success of the Louisville campaign led to an ongoing effort to extend the "Louisville Merger Model" to urban areas across the country, backed through the local and national Chamber of Commerce and the Alliance for Regional Stewardship.  "Regional Stewardship" is the new euphemism for these government mergers that consolidate and centralize power in line with the "strong mayor-weak council" corporate led model developed in Louisville..  While there is a long history of attempts to centralize control over people in urban and regional systems, the "Regional Stewardship" approach goes beyond the historic rationales of "efficiency" and "tax equalization" to justify mergers in terms of servicing globalization regimes, rationalized in terms of the need to "compete globally" by conforming to the requirements of trade harmonization, global industrialization zones, and corporate demands for tax giveaways, workforce training, wage competition, deregulation, reduced corporate reporting, and so on.

Contesting this "consolidation" approach are disparate groupings of critics and movements;

• The advocates of federated local governments through "metropolitan governance," such as Savitch, Vogel and Owens; 
• The "New Localism" sustainability and bio-regionalism movements advanced by the Institute for Local Self Reliance,  the Rocky Mountain Institute, the North American Bio-Regional Congress, and others;  
• "Bottom up" local direct democracy and confederal approaches of "municipal libertarianism" developed through social ecology and the "sustainable neighborhood economic development councils"  proposed though never fully elaborated by the working groups of the People's Agenda.

Below are links to some of the sources and literature.

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