With apologies to TV junk dealer Fred Sanford, will failing Mon Valley municipalities clutch their hearts and wail, "I'm coming to join you, Elizabeth Township"?

That's a question raised by a radical proposal that won't go away. The idea: Merge 39 municipalities in southeastern Allegheny County and call it Rivers City.

	Online Graphic: Merging along the Mon? Another in an occasional series exploring alternatives for the communities of the Pittsburgh region. Visit previous reports at our Metrovisions Index Page.

If it came to pass, the beleaguered Mon Valley would become the third-largest city in the commonwealth, rather than a collection of oddly shaped and fiscally struggling cities, boroughs and townships.

"The logic is so compelling," said David Miller, associate dean at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

Miller, admittedly, may be a bit biased. He's the one who came up with the idea.

But the proposal has its advocates, one of the most enthusiastic being Dave Coplan, director of the Mon Valley Providers Council, a coalition of social-service organizations.

"It's an important concept for people to hear about and get to know," Coplan said. "You can't help but think that [Rivers City] would be better than what we have today."

The Rivers City concept is a spinoff of research conducted in the Pittsburgh office of the Pennsylvania Economy League, which Miller directed from 1992 to 1996.

Together with Economy League colleague Brian Jensen, Miller charted the fiscal condition of Allegheny County municipalities, looking at annual figures going back to 1980.

Their work showed that Mon Valley municipalities, generally speaking, were in bad shape and getting worse.

Five of them -- Clairton, Braddock, Rankin, Duquesne and Homestead -- have been labeled as fiscally "distressed" by the state. And at least 15 others are doing poorly.

With the problem identified and measured, Miller and Jensen began to brainstorm for solutions.

Miller was jogging one day in 1995 when the Rivers City idea popped into his head.

"The Mon Valley is not suburbs. It has all the features of an urban community," he said, mentioning high rates of crime and poverty as examples. "It's an urban area and it has a dumb organizational structure."

Looking over the 39 municipalities, Miller counted 361 elected officials, 35 police chiefs and 36 planning commissions -- all in an area that has one-quarter fewer residents than the city of Pittsburgh.

"Who in their right mind would design this kind of institution?" Miller said.

He doesn't claim that a merged Mon Valley would save money. What Rivers City would do, he contends, is coordinate economic development planning and wield political clout.

"Pittsburgh and Rivers City would be thought of as the twin cities, like Minneapolis-St. Paul," Miller said. "It would be almost an equal partner to the city of Pittsburgh."

If nothing else, Rivers City Hall would provide a central point of contact for governors, Congress members, county chief executives and business leaders on their visits to the Mon Valley. As it stands now, they have to choose among 39 municipalities, three councils of governments, and numerous organizations, including the Mon Valley Initiative, the West-to-West Coalition, and the Mon Valley Providers Council.

At Coplan's invitation, Miller has given a PowerPoint presentation on Rivers City to members of the providers group. And he has been the guest speaker at luncheons of a service organization or two.

Resistance to Rivers City

Not surprisingly, the proposal has not found much support among the 361 elected officials who currently populate the 134 square miles of Rivers City. About 350 of them would lose their positions under Miller's proposal.

"It sounds like something out of Russia," said Dean Bradley, the Dravosburg council president. "That's not going to fly here. It will never happen."

Envisioning Rivers City, Liberty Councilwoman Lavina Kerklo worries about what would happen to her borough of 2,600 people.

"We'd be lost in the shuffle because we're so small," she said.

McKeesport Mayor James Brewster doubts that Mon Valley residents would tolerate a big-city bureaucracy.

"They want to call someone up they know to get a pothole fixed," he said.

Brewster also questions the compatibility of Rivers City's components, which would include relatively affluent Edgewood, commercially vibrant Monroeville, badly decaying Braddock, and primarily rural Forward Township.

"When you look at the diversity of the 39 communities, I believe the differences there would be one of the major pitfalls of combining them," he said.

Maybe the only member of a Mon Valley municipal council who supports the Rivers City proposal is Bill Scheetz, the Lincoln council president.

"I think [the merger] should have happened a long time ago," Scheetz said. "I don't think we'll ever see it in my lifetime, but it should be done."

The Lincoln council president estimates that his borough could cut its law-enforcement expenditures by 50 percent if the Mon Valley formed a regional police department.

But Forward Commissioner Thomas Headley scoffs at the notion that law enforcement would be more economical in Rivers City. The new city would have to raise officer pay levels to the highest rate offered in any of the 39 municipalities, he estimates.

"Everyone says a merger is the answer. Well, there would be tremendous problems," he said.

Miller disagrees. At a minimum, he maintains that Rivers City would provide better service, if not necessarily cheaper service. Rivers City, for instance, would field a professional police force, rather than a squad of part-timers, he said.

Miller also theorizes that Rivers City would have better elected leadership than many Mon Valley municipalities, suggesting that capable people would be attracted to run for office in a city of 250,000 people.

Brewster himself has complained about the caliber of elected officials in the Mon Valley. But he doesn't see Rivers City as the antidote.

"No one has proven to me yet where mergers have improved the leadership of the merged entities," the McKeesport mayor said. "Poor leadership is poor leadership, whether it's in a community of 500 people or 500,000 people."

Brewster has an alternative idea for improving local governments: Larger cities such as McKeesport could sell policing or other services to smaller municipalities.

"I think you're going to see a wave of that start to happen," Brewster said. "Local politicians won't be offended by that."

Losing out on aid
Brewster sees at least one advantage to the Rivers City concept, though: The merged municipality would attract more state and federal revenue to the Mon Valley.

Presumably, a city of 250,000 people would have a professional staff to aggressively pursue state and federal grants, and a mayor too powerful to ignore.

In the competition for state and federal money, Coplan believes the Mon Valley is getting short-changed because of its fragmented patchwork of municipal governments.

"We've got a very poor and economically disadvantaged region here," he said. "For a place that has so many needs, the government spending just doesn't measure up."

Asserting that the Mon Valley receives less state and federal money per capita than the city of Pittsburgh is one thing. Quantifying it is another.

Because of the great number of funding streams emanating from Harrisburg and Washington, it is difficult to compare the allotments of Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley.

For instance, from 2001 to 2004, Pittsburgh received an average of $65.27 per person in federal Community Development Block Grants. During the same period, the 39 municipalities within Rivers City's borders received $32.53.

But Councils of Governments, or COGs, in the Mon Valley also received allotments of block grant money, complicating the comparison with Pittsburgh.

Tax equity
Miller looked at a variety of state and federal grant programs four years ago and calculated that Pittsburgh received $189 per capita to Rivers City's $49. But he has not updated the calculations since then.

Whether the creation of Rivers City would completely bridge the funding gap between Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley is an open question, but one result that would accrue from merging the 39 municipalities is undeniable: Inequities in municipal taxation would be eliminated.

The municipal income and property tax rates in Rankin and Duquesne are more than triple the rates in Forward, Wilkins, White Oak and Liberty. Living in Rivers City, everyone in the Mon Valley would pay the same income tax rate and property tax millage to their municipality.

If the Rivers City proposal were to find public support, it might come from the heavily taxed residents of municipalities such as Rankin, Duquesne, Wilkinsburg and Homestead.

But even if the public were to clamor for the creation of Rivers City, a daunting obstacle would remain in the form of Pennsylvania law. To put it mildly, the state doesn't encourage such large-scale consolidations.

For Rivers City to become reality, a majority of voters in each of the 39 municipalities would have to approve a referendum simultaneously. If the referendum failed to win a majority in even one municipality, the entire consolidation proposal would go down to defeat.

"My sense is those individual [municipalities] want to maintain their independence," said state Sen. Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills. "Bigger is not always better."

Still, Miller has not given up on his idea. "I think Rivers City is a compelling academic argument," he said. "Making it a popular argument will be a real challenge."