In the first year after Louisville, Ky. merged with outlying Jefferson County, the new combined government was able to eliminate an $18 million shortfall in revenue by cutting redundant operations and services.

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Bond ratings also rose for the new larger Louisville after the 2003 merger in addition to another real benefit: the consolidation of city and county police forces that previously did not speak to each other.

But there are other less tangible by-products of the merger that may prove to be more important, according to a prominent Kentucky lawyer who served as vice chair of a local government task force that put the merger idea on the public agenda.

"We no longer have two co-equal governments competing to set a public agenda," Sheryl Snyder yesterday told the 4th annual Smart Growth Conference in Oakland, sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Institute of Politics, the Pittsburgh Foundation and Sustainable Pittsburgh.

"There's a buzz about Louisville. There's a can-do attitude in Lousiville right now," he said. "I think the feeling of civic well-being is higher than its been in the last 20 years because we did something that we feel is important."

The Louisville merger, which followed several failed attempts going back to the 1950s, created a 26-member metro council to replace the city's 12-member board of aldermen and a three-member fiscal court that ran Jefferson County. The merger left intact 95 small cities that had incorporated in Jefferson County to thwart earlier annexation attempts by Louisville.

Both Louisville and Pittsburgh have industrial heritages. Prior to the merger, the old Louisville was facing decline as growth occurred outside city limits in the county -- a situation similar to today's relationship between Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.

Jefferson County, however, was already a major service provider to the many small cities that had incorporated within its boundaries, unlike Allegheny County where many of 129 municipalities provide their own police and other services.

Louisville and Jefferson County also went into the merger after having agreed in 1986 to share revenues from a 1.5 percent income tax on new jobs created outside the city limits.

Despite differences, Snyder said Pittsburgh and Allegheny County can look to Louisville and say that government consolidation can be done if the community is involved with a bottom-up, not top-down, approach.

"It was not a panacea," Snyder said. "But in our community it was a major step forward."

He said attempts to merge Louisville and Jefferson County failed in 1982 and 1983 primarily because the efforts were led by a business community that relied on a television campaign without local community involvement.

That changed with the later creation of a local government task force of 164 members from neighborhoods, small cities and other entities that over a two-year period tried to come up with a new form of government.

Although the task force's idea for an expanded regional county government failed to win necessary approval of Kentucky's state legislature, it led to a meeting of the minds of elected city and county officials who came up with the final merger proposal.

"We moved the agenda forward in a way that, I think, laid the ground work for the ultimate success," Snyder said, noting that the grass roots support was the result of a sophisticated $1.5 million political campaign.

Yesterday's conference, meant to address regionalism, governance and Western Pennsylvania's competitiveness in the global economy, also heard from Piero Gastaldo, who runs a well-endowed private foundation in Turin, Italy.

Gastaldo described how Turin, also hurt by the decline of big industry, is experimenting with regional cooperation across international borders including major economic development projects such as a high-speed train link between Turin and Lyon, France.

The drive toward cooperation with international neighbors who share participation in the European Union is driven in part by a desire to better compete in an increasingly global economic arena, he said.

Also on the agenda was a review of a previously released report by The Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

The report notes metropolitan Pittsburgh is aging and has lost significant population in the last decade and that almost all of the growth in the region took place in its outer suburbs.

Employment has also become decentralized. Almost 57 percent of the new private sector jobs created in the Pittsburgh region between 1994 and 2001 were located 10 miles outside central business districts.

By 2000, 71 percent of Pittsburgh-area residents commuted to jobs located in the suburbs as urban decline weakened many older neighborhoods, burdening taxpayers.