In the past, we've thought of our feudal system of government as, at worst, a charming inconvenience.

Allegheny County's big cluster of tiny little townships and boroughs, established back in horse-and-buggy days, was a quaint holdover that offered more benefits than burdens.

Sure, it cost us all a little extra in duplicated services (Neighboring municipal headquarters just blocks apart! Garbage haulers negotiating separate contracts for every 300 or 400 homes!), but the distinctive identity it provided each cozy community (I'm from Bellevue! Well, I'm from Ben Avon!) was prized.

Now, thanks to another devastating flood, we can see that this system of government isn't merely inconvenient. It is essentially and devastatingly unfair. It has become, in fact, a kind of "taxation without representation" that would have had our forebears fomenting a revolution.

The car has been a common convenience for almost a century now. Kids no longer take trains and horse-drawn wagons to escape a steamy city summer for the far-flung farms and forests of Camp Horne Road.

Most of those kids, in fact, are all grown up and living with their children and grandchildren in new subdivisions on those once remote farms, and on former farms in new suburbs like Marshall, Pine and Richland.

But we've clung to a system of government -- a system of organizing ourselves supposedly for the common good -- that allows us to ignore the fate of our most vulnerable neighbors: the people who still live where the rain running off our booming suburban developments merges to fill the Three Rivers.

No, this fragmented system doesn't just allow us to ignore our neighbors' fate, it allows us to actively make things worse.

Can anyone look at the pictures of this month's repeated flooding in Millvale and not think we're doing something very wrong? The decades of debris clogging Girty's Run and the extra millions of gallons of water sweeping through nearby basements didn't come from Millvale. It came from upstream, where independent townships can build and pave and build some more, without a thought for what they're doing to the (usually less prosperous) people downstream. This has to change.

While touring the destruction in Millvale, County Executive Dan Onorato said he might push the state Legislature to give the county more oversight on local development to prevent this thoughtless harm. He must do this. Officials and residents of low-lying communities should hold his and their state representatives' feet to the fire.

In the meantime, these very same people should be at every planning committee or council meeting in the suburbs to their north, making sure that any new development there is held accountable for its impact downstream.

McKnight Road may be able to handle a couple more strip malls, but can the Pine Creek watershed? Millvale residents would say "no."

The state Municipal Planning Code provides for, even encourages, this kind of input from neighboring communities, but it's rarely seen. When it is, it doesn't have any teeth, and you don't have to look to flood zones to witness the impact -- or lack thereof.

When a landslide shut down the Wal-Mart site development in Kilbuck last fall, much of the heavy traffic from Route 65 had to be diverted onto Ohio Township's two-lane roadways. Not only did the township have to pay police officers to direct the awful rush-hour traffic jams, but within weeks a small stretch near the crest of Mount Nebo Road had crumbled.

Did Kilbuck pay for this? No, although the developer had to cover some of the cost.

Perhaps a comprehensive countywide approach to development would prevent one township's unilateral and sometimes ill-advised decisions from draining the till of the township up the road -- or down the watershed.

When any small group of people can make decisions that take thousands or millions of dollars from others who were given no vote in the matter, is this representative self-government we can be proud of? After their third recent "once in a century" flood, Millvale residents would say no. So might the weary commuters driving around the Route 65 landslide.

Consolidating government services and community planning into larger, more representative bodies that share the costs, the benefits and the responsibilities of development is, at this point in local history, a good and necessary thing.

It will not, of course, guarantee that Nature's wrath and man's incompetence won't combine for more loss or even tragedy. Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans provide the most recent lesson in the truth that if human beings are involved, humans will find a way to foul things up.

But reasonable consolidations at least offer the possibility that older, less advantaged communities will have a fighting chance at fairness. Right now, they're just getting dumped on.