Hello,

 

I am a graduate student and Cleveland State working on a capstone project for a class in Organizational Behavior. Our project requires acting as "consulting teams" to two government subdivisions, agencies, offices or authorities in that exist in overlapping villages, cities, counties or special districts ONLY in the Cleveland Metro Area (encompassing Cuyahoga, Lorain, Medina, Lake and Geauga).

 

The main mission behind the project is to research and make recommendations involving possible merger and/or consolidation to include, but not exclusive to: organizational structure, staffing, budgets, geographical area, quality/cost of services, infrastructure and identification of salary structures.

 

I am wondering if anyone has had any experience in the past with this type of research and can recommend some good information and/or contacts that might be able to help out my team.

 

Also, perhaps someone has suggestions on how to approach this project based on their knowledge of local government in the Cleveland Metro region. Are there any government agencies that could use consolidation in overlapping jurisdictions that you know of?

 

Any information, contacts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

I can be reached at [email protected] if you want to contact me directly.

 

Thanks,

 

Brian Coleman

You will probably find some useful information, discussion, links and articles in this thread, but most of that would involve consolidation on a much larger scale than I believe you are researching -

 

http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,3595.0.html

 

FWIW, Safety Forces (police, fire, EMT) use mutual aid contracts and you can look into the efficiencies of those.  School Districts overlap.  So do Sewer Districts.  Cities will also "share" legal counsel by using private lawyers who specialize in municipal law as opposed to having in-house counsel stationed at City Hall.  These lawyers are often considered employees and not officials.

 

Good luck!