No one benefits when we encourage more governments

WHEN STATE LAWMAKERS address local government, they almost always do harm. They restrict where and how cities can grow. They order cities and counties to provide more services or grant special tax breaks, but refuse to provide the money to pay for those items. They take away taxing options, or dole them out with so many limits that they actually encourage the irresponsibility they decry.

A law that prohibits the creation of brand-new municipalities within five miles of existing towns or cities is one of the few that actually encourages strong, logical, efficient local government. So, in an apparent effort to keep from marring their perfect (as in perfectly awful) record, legislators want to do away with it.

The existing law is grounded in the very sound idea that it’s more efficient and more conducive to smart planning and orderly growth to have a single larger city providing the services people in an urban area demand than it is to have multiple, contiguous small towns all trying to provide those same services (or, worse, refusing to provide services, while draining state funds from the cities that do provide services). The five-mile limitation can cut down on the wasteful proliferation of little governments without slamming the door on the aspirations of people who want to live in a municipality, but not that municipality. It’s not even an absolute rule: An area is allowed to incorporate regardless of the five-mile limit if the local population reaches 15,000, or if the nearby city is in another county, or if the nearby city refuses its request to be annexed.

But that’s not enough of an out for everyone.

As is often the case when legislators make bad law, this change has its genesis not in a careful assessment of what is the best policy for our state, but in a specific case that is generating political passion.

Across the state and across the country, Charleston is widely regarded as one of our more successful cities, well managed and well planned, and offering an extremely high quality of life to residents and visitors alike. It also is regarded with disdain by some of its nearest neighbors, who, for reasons ranging from the anti-authority orneriness that has long characterized our state to pure partisan politics, do not want ever to be part of the city. On James Island, this disdain has resulted for nearly a decade in efforts to form a separate town — an anti-city, if you will — to protect residents from being annexed into Charleston.

Each time folks there try this, they get struck down by the courts. And each time that happens, legislators — who resent Charleston even more, because they want to make sure the Legislature is the only governmental body in the state with any real power — come to the rescue, with special new laws to try to aid their quest.

The proposal that passed the Senate last week is merely the latest such effort, this time to wipe away entirely the law that prevents this anti-Charleston effort.

Even if the law could somehow be limited to the situation in Charleston County (it can’t; that’s unconstitutional), it would be a bad idea. The fact that it would encourage the proliferation of even more competing, duplicative, expensive little governments across the state makes it a boondoggle — and yet another example of why we can never seem to move our state forward: Our lawmakers show little interest in making government better, and all too frequently go out of their way to make it worse.