The idea of merging the governments of Durham County and the city of Durham has been around for 60 years, but the final meeting of the Citizens' Committee on Governmental Structure tomorrow night could bring that idea a step closer to realization.
On Thursday, the committee will give the larger Merger Steering Committee its recommendation on the best way to structure a merged government.
There are several justifications for the potential merger, which would combine the current city council and county commission into a single governing body.
The merger also seems to have popular support; two separate polls in the last year have shown that residents favor the merger by a ratio of two to one.
But even with this general sentiment, there are greatly varied views on how a merger should be implemented.
"Merger's not a magic word," said county commissioner Becky Heron. "We've got to be sure that the [merged] government is going to be able to run more efficiently and to provide better services, ... and we don't know that-not yet, at least."
"We seem to have two separate governments that frequently take different views," said Bill Brian, the chair of the Friends of Durham political action group and a member of the Committee on Governmental Structure.
He cited the landfill, the regional mall and the school system as examples of the bodies' contradictory stances. "This sort of 'policy schizophrenia' is not appropriate for a community as small as we are."
Over 80 percent of the county's population resides in the city, and the city and the county are served by the same school system. Durham County is the only county in North Carolina with only one municipality, leading to a great deal of overlap between the functions of the two boards.
Disagreement centers around the questions of setting taxation rates, establishing a policy of partisan or non-partisan elections and drawing new districts that provide fair racial representation in the merged government.
To this end, the joint city-county Merger Steering Committee, which is composed of all five county commissioners and some city council members, has appointed a number of citizen subcommittees to work out the details of each problem and then present their recommendations to the steering committee.
One of these committees-the Citizens' Committee on Governmental Structure-has the task of determining exactly how to combine the 12-member city council, soon to be reduced to seven members, and the five-member county commission into a single governing body, along with making recommendations on the system used to elect that governing body. Currently, the county commissioners are elected to at-large posts in partisan elections; half the city council members are elected at-large and the rest serve specific residential wards.
There are now two proposals before the subcommittee, each presenting compromises on the issues of partisan vs. non-partisan and residency ward vs. at-large elections.
The first, proposed by Brian, suggests "merger in place." The seven city council members and the five county commissioners would be elected just as they are now, but they would serve on a single 12-member board.
"It is not a beautiful proposal, it is not a profound proposal, it is not even what I would ideally like to see," Brian said. But, he added, it successfully accomplishes merger because it allows all interest groups to maintain their current status. "Then," he said, "we can focus on political reform."
The chief drawback to Brian's plan is that it creates a 12-member council, an even number that makes tied votes a potential problem and that some say is too large.
"Nine should be a maximum," Heron said. "I mean, where's your consolidation? I thought that was the whole point of merger."
In order to reduce the council to an odd number, some favor eliminating the mayor and replacing the position with a chair appointed from the combined city-county council. Others, however, said the mayor serves an important symbolic function.
"The fact that you have a city without a directly elected representative of the people is kind of odd to me," Mayor Nick Tennyson said. "But it's not a deal killer."
Committee member Lee Mortimer proposed the second option. Mortimer's plan focuses on the use of eight voting districts, which would each nominate two potential council members, eight of whom would then be chosen in an at-large election. These members could run as Democrats, Republicans or non-partisans.
With this compromise between partisan and non-partisan elections, Mortimer said he hopes to accomplish full merger and government reform in one step, rather than waiting five years to assess changes then, as Brian suggests.
The meeting, which is open to the public, will be held at 6:30 tomorrow night at the Downtown YMCA.
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