SOUTH CAROLINA, population 4 million, has more than 900 local governments, which jealously guard their power and often refuse to work together. That’s an average of one government, with all its expenses, for every 4,400 residents.

Richland and Lexington counties alone have two county governments, 13 municipalities, seven school districts and at least a half dozen special little governments that were created to provide a single service, be it recreation or water or fire protection.

You couldn’t do worse if you were trying to create a system that wastes money and encourages officials to act against the public interest. The duplication, turf battles and lack of accountability that this system produces make even state government look good.

But don’t bother marching on City Hall. The folks there have no power to reduce the number of competing governments, or even to make them work together.

The problem is at the State House.

Local governments are the entities closest to the people, where citizens have the best chance to influence decisions, at least when they are kept to a reasonable number, so citizens can keep track of them. It is their actions that most affect our daily lives. But in South Carolina, local government isn’t controlled by local officials. It’s controlled by state legislators, to the detriment of both local government and state government.

Legislators appoint and protect most of the 500 or so special little governments that provide water, sewer, fire and recreation services to tiny segments of the public.

They prevent cities and counties from consolidating and school districts from merging. They keep cities from expanding and providing the municipal services that urban residents demand.

They force duties down on local governments, then force them to use the hated property tax to pay the bill.

To make matters worse, all this meddling robs our part-time legislators of the time and energy they need for the full-time job of overseeing a $17 billion state government and dealing properly with issues such as education, tax policy, tort reform and insurance law.

The result is that in a poor state, we pay top dollar for bottom-tier services.

A PROMISE BROKEN

This was supposed to change in 1973, when legislators amended the constitution with the Home Rule Act.

And much did improve.

Legislators stopped writing county budgets, which freed them up some to tend to the state. County councils got to set taxes and decide how to allocate money and how to provide local services. They got to decide such purely local matters as zoning.

But much did not improve.

Many expected Home Rule would mean an end to those 500 special purpose districts; it didn’t. Legislators simply stopped creating more of them.

Home Rule was supposed to put an end to special laws written for each county; it didn’t. Local legislators still write laws dictating tax policy, spending decisions and even personnel matters within their counties.

The Legislature has even taken away some of the power that voters thought they ordered it to give local government. Home Rule gave cities the power to enact any laws the Legislature didn’t prohibit, but when they started finding ways to raise money without relying on the property tax, the Legislature stopped them.

FORCE DUPLICATION

The consequences of legislators’ refusal to yield power are widespread and diverse:

• Drive through just about any urban area, and you’ll see a city garbage truck plucking up refuse from one side of the street, a county truck from the other; city and county police play the same game of duplication. That’s the result of our restrictive annexation laws.

New residents don’t stop demanding city services just because cities can’t take them in. So counties have to provide garbage pickup and police crowded urban areas. That means duplication on the streets, and in the front office.

A reasonable solution would be for a city and county to consolidate once counties make the turn from rural to urban. But the Legislature has refused to allow that. Twenty years after voters demanded it, the General Assembly finally passed a law in 1992 that claimed to allow city-county consolidation; but local officials quickly found that the way the law was written made any merger a technical impossibility.

• Cities are allowed to consolidate, but there’s no incentive to do so. To the contrary, the state encourages their proliferation. That’s what happened in Charleston County when some residents decided they didn’t want to pay for city services. They formed the town of James Island, which rented a storefront for town hall but provided no police or fire protection, no zoning, nothing.

When the Supreme Court ordered the town dismantled last year, because it had been formed illegally, it had $1.2 million sitting in the bank. That’s money the county and state gave it just because it was called a municipality — money that was meant to help real cities provide services to residents.

• In 2003, the Richland County Recreation Commission spent $65,000 essentially to buy the resignation of an employee who pleaded guilty to embezzling public money. Later that year, the commission let its new Ballentine Community Center sit idle for months during a dispute with the County Council. The council couldn’t do anything in either case because the recreation commission is controlled by legislators.

So is the Irmo-Chapin Recreation Commission, which serves half of Lexington County while the Legislature’s Lexington Recreation and Aging Commission serves the other half. And the Richland County Election Commission, which had to mothball nearly $400,000 worth of new voting machines the county purchased in the 1980s because local senators didn’t like the brand.

• Columbia and Richland County can’t use money from their new restaurant tax to pay for school teachers, police, road repair or anything else residents need; they must spend it on arts programs and athletic facilities. Smaller counties have it worse: They can only use the money for tourism-related infrastructure, so they have to raise property taxes to run the programs that use the new infrastructure. That’s because the Legislature constrains not only how local governments can raise money but also how they can spend it.

Ironically, it is this compulsion to control local government finances that has created one of legislators’ biggest headaches — the property tax backlash. Local officials have begged for decades for more taxing options, so they don’t have to rely almost exclusively on property taxes to pay for local services and schools, but the Legislature has largely refused. So as rates remain stable or rise slightly on other taxes, they spiral upward on the tax that most people hate the most.

ONE STEP FORWARD, ONE STEPBACK

There have been a few grudging steps toward local autonomy since the initial burst of action — and inaction — following Home Rule.

When the original Power Failure series was published 14 years ago, legislators still controlled local road-paving. The Supreme Court later took that power away, and today many county councils control the so-called C-funds.

Another big problem for local governments in 1991 was the Legislature’s habit of ordering them to upgrade their jails, increase school funding or perform any number of tasks without providing money to pay for it.

Lawmakers have since passed a law that requires them to calculate how much any new law will cost local governments; that bit of sunshine has slowed the unfunded mandate flood to a trickle. (Unfortunately, legislators also have failed to adequately fund the public schools and other public services, which has forced responsible local governments to pick up the slack.)

Other improvements weren’t so clear-cut.

In 1998, the Legislature finally passed a law that allows voters to dismantle special purpose districts. But no one has used the law because it requires that an unrealistic 40 percent of property owners sign a petition, and then two-thirds of voters approve the dissolution.

Two years later, the Legislature loosened up the annexation law, which had prohibited cities from taking in land without the approval of at least 75 percent of the property owners, who owned at least 75 percent of the property. It still isn’t easy, but now cities can grow if 25 percent of the residents sign a petition, and half the residents vote to be annexed.

More recently, legislators have become aggressive in pushing in the other direction. Every year brings stepped-up attempts to restrict annexation authority, to place shackles on how cities and counties spend money, even to scale back that most basic of local powers — zoning decisions. Most of these assaults have been defeated, but still they keep coming.

TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT

The early resistance to true Home Rule isn’t so difficult to understand.

Most of us take for granted the idea that governmental functions that can be performed at the local level should be performed at the local level, where government is closest to the people it serves; that the state should assist the local body in carrying out its tasks, and ensure that citizens across the state are served.

For legislators in the early 1970s, these were radical ideas — ideas that took away much of their power.

But since then, a whole new generation — and a whole new breed — of legislators has been elected.

Today’s Republican legislators talk about the virtues of local authority. They talk about the virtues of limited government, of fiscal restraint, efficiency and low taxes. And yet they tie up our small state with 900 separate local governments. They force those governments to duplicate each others’ work. They make it nearly impossible for some of the governments to cooperate. At a whim, they step in and change the rules those governments operate by. And all the while, they do a lousy job running the state government, often because they simply don’t have the time for it.

Our legislators are right: We do have too much government — at the local level. We do waste money on duplication and inefficiency. We should be able to do more with less. But they won’t let us.

Wednesday: An independent Legislature and judiciary can balance a strong executive. Read this series and more at www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/10646771.htm.