Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato and Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy said yesterday they plan to ask the state Legislature for the right to put the issue of a city-county merger before voters.

"The mayor and I have been meeting and working on this for months, and we're building a strategy to bring to Harrisburg," Onorato said at a luncheon sponsored by the League of Women Voters. "We have to convince the Legislature to give us the right to vote on this."

Onorato and Murphy last addressed the group more than a year ago to discuss efforts to consolidate city and county functions, and they were in the ballroom of Point Park University yesterday to explain what they've accomplished since then and what they think needs to be done in the future.

Onorato repeated his desire to follow the model of Louisville, Ky., which merged its city and county governments two years ago, creating Metro Louisville, while letting the municipalities surrounding the city remain intact.

If Pittsburgh and Allegheny County followed suit, the new entity would have a population of 1.27 million, making it the seventh-largest American city.

"Merging the two is not going to save millions and millions of dollars," Onorato said, arguing that the main advantage would be an image improvement for the region. "We're going to streamline the government. We're going to make it a big city again. We're going to make it business friendly. Companies are going to want to be here."

Murphy said the main obstacle to a merger will be overcoming what he described as a traditional resistance to change in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.

"I'd like to see it on the ballot in November," he said of a possible merger. He also raised the idea of asking voters to consider the creation of a commission that would study the issue in depth.

The two government bodies made consolidations in three areas in the last year, Onorato said.

The city moved its 911 dispatchers to the county's 911 center in North Point Breeze, making them county workers, and the county took over the city's police fingerprinting program.

Onorato also cited the state Supreme Court's decision late last year to eliminate Pittsburgh Magistrates Court, making it part of the Common Pleas Court system, as an example of consolidation.

Murphy described the raising of the city's annual occupation tax from $10 to $52 as a major boost, saying Pittsburgh has changed its tax structure to reflect that it is the "center of this region," with commuter workers contributing a fairer share of the city's tax revenue.

Neither Onorato nor Murphy discussed combining purchasing departments, which the city's Act 47 financial recovery plan says could save Pittsburgh $150,000 this year.

"No progress has been made on this critical initiative," Murphy wrote in a letter to City Council on March 7.

Both leaders acknowledged that opposition to a merger of county and city governments would be strong, with Republicans in the suburbs wary of taking on the city's financial problems and Democrats in the city fearing dilution of their political power.

Onorato said that a new County Council would need more representation for blacks, who make up 27 percent of the city's population but only about 13 percent of the county's population.

Merging the county's 43 school districts, Murphy said, would be difficult because of issues of race and class, but Onorato argued that getting a city-county government merger would be a huge accomplishment on its own.

"This is probably the most important issue that we're going to face in our lifetime," Onorato said, "and if we miss the opportunity in the next couple of years, I believe we won't have this chance again."