June 11, 2000 All local governments need money to hire police and firefighters, and build roads, sewers and parks. And no local government leader wants to raise unpopular property taxes. So they look to commercial development as the answer, because it will generate both increased property taxes and higher sales tax revenue. But when it comes time to talk turkey with a commercial developer, the city typically starts from a position of weakness, Emmi said. If City A and Developer X can't reach a deal, the developer can just move across a line on a map and start talks with City B. "The bidding can get especially fierce when ... fragmented local jurisdictions within metropolitan regions compete with one another for these businesses," the National Resources Defense Council wrote in a 1997 report called "Once There Were Greenfields," which Emmi recommends to his students. The rule of thumb among city planners is that a commercial development, like a new shopping mall, will generate enough tax dollars to pay for all the services the city needs to provide to the mall, with plenty left over. But that broad statement misses some key points, Emmi said. Often, to land a development, a community is forced to make concessions to a developer. So to get the extra sales tax, cities end up giving away a lot of what they were looking for through redevelopment agency tax defer- ments, or through the cost of building new roads or water lines. "Commercial developments don't come free," Emmi said. "In fact they often come at a loss." A fragmented urban area also is less able to coordinate planning. It's rare when a major development in one community doesn't affect its neighbors, Oates said. In his case, new sub-divisions in Farr West and Pleasant View will mean increases in the traffic flowing through his town. "It's going to be easier if we all cooperate together," Oates said. "What's it going to do for your city? What's it going to do to my city? Are we getting the roads we need to control the traffic flow?" But too often, Carr said, officials in neighboring cities don't talk to each other, focusing instead only on impacts within their own boundaries. The same holds true with commercial development, Christopolous said. Utah already has a glut of retail space, he said. But tax-hungry cities continue to pursue new retail development: the massive Gateway project in Salt Lake City, for example, or Bountiful's smaller Five Points Mall. "Nobody looks at it in its aggregate," Christopolous said. "We're building this massive (retail) infrastructure and further dividing the pie." Already, "a lot of these new stores are only marginally profitable," he said. He fears it will lead to a new kind of blight -"overbuilt blight... everything's new, but empty." ' Finally, there's the question of efficiency. Does it make sense to have duplicated departments, performing the same functions, for each little town within the larger metro area? Of course not, said Emmi. But, he added, "There's rarely a full examination of this idea, that one can't deal with the problems of inefficient development patterns with more inefficient development patterns." Consolidation So what's the solution? In some metro areas - Indianapolis, for example, and Memphis - the city and county governments have merged into one entity, Hebert said. Combining the governments brings planning and organization under one umbrella. There is one set of training standards for all fire departments, for example, and uniform record-keeping for all law enforcement. It doesn't necessarily mean any savings of tax dollars, Hebert said. In fact, research on metro areas with combined city/county governments shows about an even split between those that have saved money, those that spent more money, and those that came out even, he said. It's not hard to see why, Weber County officials said. The chiefs of the county's paid fire departments have talked about the idea off and on for years, North View Fire District Chief Lynn Froerer said. "It keeps coming around, swinging around." "If the purpose of consolidation is just to save money, I don't think that's possible," Froerer said. "There's enough departments with enough un-met needs that we can't do it to save money." In his department alone, he said, the station is nearing the end of its useful lifespan, and a new truck also is going to be necessary soon. The newly consolidated coun 495