Small Town Civic Structure and Interlocal Collaboration for Public Services

Local governments are responsible for financing and providing an array of public services ranging from police, fire, and emergency medical services to streets, parks, and water. Two mechanisms, civic structure and interlocal collaboration, have the potential to solve the problem of providing high–quality public services in the face of declining resources and increasing needs. We find that civic structure—citizen engagement in solving public problems—is positively and strongly associated with perceived quality of small town public services. Although many rural towns have entered into service agreements with other local governments, this approach is not significantly associated with citizen ratings of overall service quality. Citizens seem to prefer their local government directly providing police services rather than entering into interlocal agreements. This suggests that leaders and heads of departments providing public services need to carefully assess which services are most appropriately shared across governments to achieve cost savings and which support sense of community and would be better provided directly.

Small Town Services and Facilities: The Influence of Social Networks and Civic Structure on Perceptions of Quality

In this research, it is posited that perceptions of the quality of services and facilities in small towns are dependent on the social organization of those places. Two components of this social organization are the social capital that inheres among individuals and the civic structure of the town. This hypothesis is tested using multi‐level models that combine individual‐level social capital and community‐level civic structure to explain variations among 99 rural towns in Iowa. I find that civic structure contributes positively and significantly to effects between communities, while individual‐level social capital is positive and a significant contributor to effects within communities. The civic structure models explain 32 percent of the variance in perceptions of the quality of core public facilities and services and 43 percent of the variance in secondary public‐private services. The strong contributions of individual social capital and civic structure suggest that investments in the micro and macro social structure of small towns can assist in strengthening perceptions of community infrastructure.