Entrepreneurial Advisor

A Case of Too Many - Not Too Much Government
First in a Series of Articles on Consolidating Iowa's Local Governments

As some of you know, my college education was in political science and public administration and the first 14 years of my professional career were spent working in state and local government on planning, public policy and public administration. The past twenty years have been devoted to the venture capital industry but I still feel a need to try to improve government effectiveness. I believe my work with entrepreneurs and with government are closely related. Both come from a desire to help lift up Iowa and the Midwest economically, socially and culturally.  I have spent most of my life in Iowa with five year stints in both Illinois and South Dakota.

Six to seven years ago I spent a great deal of my time writing 100+ pages of what I thought might be a book on how to reverse Iowa's century long economic and demographic stagnation. My guess is that most Americans and probably even most Iowans do not realize that Iowa has been losing ground relative to other states, in some respects for over a century. Iowa ranked 10th in population in 1900. It was bigger than California, New Jersey, Georgia and it's neighbors Minnesota and Wisconsin! However, Iowa was the slowest growing state in the 20th century and now ranks 30th. twenty states including those mentioned above surpassed Iowa in population in the 20th century, the largest drop in ranking of any state.

The 2008 population estimates shows that Iowa still holds its ranking of 30th but has grown at an unimpressive 3.75% since 2000 whereas the nation has grown by 8.2%. The five states ranked just below Iowa are all growing faster, especially Nevada and Utah and could catch them soon. While population growth is not all important in this time of limited resources, it is important economically, politically and culturally to maintain a minimum level of growth compared to other growing economies. Its comparable to Minimum Efficient Scale as it relates to for-profit entities.

Anyway the book idea got too unmanageable and I got too busy and it was set aside until now. As I look back the writing probably was not a book as much as a series of essays. Recently I decided some of what I wrote still needed to be said publicly and some was much less topical. The discussions regarding school and county consolidations continue to pop up in the statehouse and needs to be addressed thus my desire to express my views on these and other topics.


Just like any distressed organization, (whether public, private, for profit or not for profit)  state and local governments must look at both how to grow, in this case its economy, but also how to stop the bleeding - cut costs. Iowa clearly has too many units of local government and can cut costs by lowering the number. Here are the compelling numbers. Even though Iowa ranks 26th in geographical area and 30th in population, Only three states have more municipalities than Iowa, only eight states have more counties than Iowa and only eight states have more school districts than Iowa. In Iowa it seems the problem may be more a case of too many governments rather than too much government.

But willy nilly school district consolidation as has happenned in the past or cutting the number of counties in half by consolidatiing every other county with its neighbor is not the answer. We must take a look at the demographics of each area and how consolidation of one type of government might affect another. In the days to come I plan to address the re-organization of local government through, consolidation, re-classification and in some cases, re-assigment of duties through a series of articles in this blog.