Ed Glasscock landed in ºüÀêÊÓƵ and had flashbacks.
The led the campaign in 2000 to merge the city of Louisville with Jefferson County, a long-sought marriage that had failed three times previously when voters left the bride and groom at the altar.
On Wednesday, Glasscock was in town to speak to community leaders at a luncheon organized by , the civic organization that has been laying the groundwork for ºüÀêÊÓƵ to consider its own such merger. When he arrived, the news of the day was about a brewing conflict between ºüÀêÊÓƵ Mayor Francis Slay and ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Executive Steve Stenger.
The mayor and most of the top regional civic leaders recently supporting a request for a federal grant to help jump-start future development of a North-South MetroLink line that would connect south ºüÀêÊÓƵ County to North County. The line would run through the most densely populated areas in the city, on the south side, and connect people there to jobs downtown and other MetroLink stops.
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Then it would head north, connecting downtown to the new location of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and its 3,000 jobs, and the most impoverished and blighted areas of the city.
Stenger wouldn’t sign the letter. In fact, he wrote his own letter to the federal government, making sure officials in Washington knew how divided the region was.
The episode reminded Glasscock of how things used to be in Louisville. “We were really splintered,†he said of his city.
Before 2000, Louisville had a government structure very similar to what exists today in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. The city had a mayor and Board of Aldermen. The county had a county judge who was similar to the county executive, and a commission that operated much like the ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Council. Jefferson County had 83 municipalities — and continues to have almost that many today.
Some of the disputes were small.
“The mayor’s staff and judge’s staff would get into arguments about who would speak first at events,†Glasscock said.
But the infighting would get in the way of Louisville’s larger success, Glasscock said. Whether it was businesses relocating or federal officials awarding grants, the region’s division often worked against it.
“We lost credibility,†Glasscock said. “You have so many challenges from the outside, you don’t need to be fighting internally. You’ve got to be sure everybody’s on the same page.â€
That’s simply not the case in ºüÀêÊÓƵ today.
There have been some regional successes — the effort , most notably — but the sort of cooperation that is necessary to grow a region and earn sustained success in the state Legislature or tap federal resources is mostly absent.
The problem is not primarily a personal one — it’s no secret that Slay and Stenger have yet to develop a strong working relationship — it’s structural.
Unity is but a dream in a region with 90 municipalities, 81 municipal courts, 57 police departments and 43 fire districts.
After Louisville’s merger, Glasscock said, it was much easier for the region to speak with “one voice.â€
Because of on how our region’s division is costing us in terms of tax revenue, the high cost of government and lost opportunity, ºüÀêÊÓƵ has a leg up on where Louisville was in 1997, when the three-year process of persuading voters to merge began in earnest.
But getting to the finish line won’t be easy. “People don’t like change,†Glasscock said.
He hopes to help regional leaders learn from Louisville’s experience. Key to the success of the 2000 merger vote, he said, was a lot of polling and community discussion that helped civic leaders decide how to structure the merger.
For instance, voters preferred the idea of keeping their own municipality, he said, but understood that a merged, professional police department for the entire region would improve public safety.
They liked the idea of merging the offices of mayor with county judge, and the county commission with the Board of Aldermen, but they liked having some smaller government bodies to deal with more local affairs. They loved the idea of reducing the cost of government.
What a potential government merger in ºüÀêÊÓƵ might look like is an open question at this point. But there are plenty of options. A new nonprofit called ºüÀêÊÓƵ Strong is collecting ideas and seeking more on its website ().
In the end, voters will be more important to determining whether the region unites than Slay and Stenger, the current leaders of the city and the county, Glasscock said.
But the leadership of elected officials and other civic leaders will be key to determining whether a well-constructed plan gets presented to voters and a campaign that can win is forged.
Some elected officials, Glasscock said, will have a decision to make:
“They’ll have to decide if they are more worried about re-election or the communities they serve.â€