Title: The Case for Local Government | RealClearPolicy
Headings: The Case for Local Government
The Case for Local Government
By Michael Hendrix
March 04, 2019

Content: But federalism also demands that municipalities fulfill their obligations with maximal democratic authority within their spheres of governance. Self-empowering weak municipalities — say, through stronger mayors or by unifying city and county governments — must go hand-in-hand with greater democracy. This can be done, for instance, by devolving less scalable issues to neighborhood bodies. Housing policy may be best addressed at the metropolitan scale, while infrastructure maintenance is best handled at the hyper-local level. When it comes to providing quality public services to residents, local governments should aim for efficacy checked by democracy. Cities and towns have always animated the American project, their local governments acting as the central nervous system of the body politic. Participation in matters of shared consequence can reinforce a sense of the common good, laying the foundation for communities in which citizens share the tasks of maintaining and improving the places where they live. Without functioning local governments, the larger political community is in danger of heart failure. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the American project today is apathy — the sense that no one in power listens to us or is trustworthy. Social media and other technologies intensify rather than quell these anxieties.