In Durham, history doesn't wait long to repeat itself.
Once again, the idea to merge Durham's city and county governments has steadily built support, gained momentum-and died with little fanfare.
Both the Durham City Council and the County Board of Commissioners-backed by a coalition of rural residents, black activists, the Democratic party and the county sheriff-voted in early August to kill a measure that would put the question of merger onto November ballots.
"I think people had to make up their minds to go for it like it is or not go for it at all," said council member Thomas Stith. Stith initially supported the merger but voted against including the proposal, designed by a 40-citizen committee, on the ballot. "There was no room for compromise."
According to the N.C. Office of State Planning, about 77 percent of Durham County residents live in the city of Durham, the county's only municipality. And the push to combine the two governments-with potential benefits of streamlining bureaucracy and eliminating duplicate services-isn't new.
It has reached the ballot box three times already, and in 1994, when task force constructed a merger proposal, it went no further.
"The general public won't get engaged in a debate until it's a matter that is coming to them for decision," said Durham city mayor Nick Tennyson, who was one of four city council members to support the merger. "In order for us to move beyond our current state, which is a small group of people determined to keep proposals for change bottled up... we needed to get a proposal for the public to analyze."
But the current proposal had two fatal flaws, said Ellen Reckhow, co-chairman of the board.
The first matter of contention was that the proposal conflicted with the North Carolina statute governing mergers. Thus, the North Carolina General Assembly would have had to pass an amendment to state law allowing the consolidation. In addition, the General Assembly would have to pass the specific merger proposal, regardless of its adherence to the state's framework.
"It was a convenient excuse," said council member Erick Larson, also a data processing specialist at the University. "This was something that the voters needed to decide if they approved it or not."
The second fatal flaw, Reckhow said, was that the proposal would have extended city limits to the county line, a move that threatened rural residents and would require the city to pay for roads and construction outside city limits-construction previously funded by the state.
"It felt like a city takeover," said Reckhow. "This was just about the worst proposal as related to rural residents and their perception of merger."
The proposal stepped on other toes as well.
"The specific [anti-merger] coalition is exactly the same as it has been in every city across the country-rural, non-city residents oppose mergers because of the possibility of increased taxes; city political forces oppose the change in the electoral dynamics they see," Tennyson said. "And on top of that, we have a popular sheriff that was adamantly opposed to any dilution of his authority."
That sheriff, Worth Hill, was a powerful ally to those opposing the proposal. "I agree that if we do [merger], we do it right," he said. "Really, the people who wanted merger wanted merger so bad that they were compromising a whole bunch of things we couldn't live with."
Hill said the proposal's requirement that city police officials and the sheriff's department meet and merge within the next four years was unacceptable.
"The Sheriff should be in charge of all law enforcement because the sheriff is elected by the people," he said. "I'm not going to sit down with an appointed official and put together a budget."
All agreed that Durham has most likely not seen the end of merger debate. "I hope it'll come up again," said Reckhow. "But I think we need a time-out period for right now."
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