Intergovernmental responsibilities for water supply and sewage disposal in metropolitan areas. Page: 59
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function agency cannot be compared to those from a multipurpose
approach; one offers a solution to the most pressing functional
problem, the other offers a strategy for coping with metropolitan
life.
The State of Washington's Metropolitan Municipal Corporations
Act of 1957, the enabling legislation for the Municipality
of Metropolitan Seattle, provides a half-way house between the
single purpose district and multifunctional metropolitan government.
The enabling legislation makes the machinery of metropolitan
government available for one or more of the following functions:
sewage disposal, water supply, public transportation, parks and
parkways, garbage disposal and comprehensive planning. In 1957
an effort in the Seattle area to secure popular approval of a
metropolitan government empowered to perform the sewage, transportation
and planning functions failed. A second election the
same year on a less inclusive proposal, both geographically and
functionally, was successful. The areas in which there was a
heavy negative vote on the initial proposal were omitted and
Metro's powers were limited to the sewage function.
To date, the Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle has
done a competent job in developing a regional sewage system.
But it is not a metropolitan government; it cannot plan and
allocate resources for the full range of functions nor can it
assess priorities among these functions. It is staffed by
personnel whose primary training is in the planning and development
of sewage facilities. Seattle's Metro considers expansion
primarily in sewer terms, related to communities outside its
borders but within its drainage basins whose future needs have
been considered in planning the regional system. There is a
strong possibility that the founders of Seattle's Metro, most
of whom strongly favor general multipurpose metropolitan
government, by launching a metropolitan instrumentality with
a single function, have created an instrumentality which will
develop a narrow utility orientation rather than a broad concern
for the overall polity and its full range of developmental needs.
While the waste disposal system being planned and developed by
Metro already has had an impact on development patterns in the
region, the metropolitan government lacks a general planning
function and general purpose planners. Serious questions can
be raised about the competency of sanitary engineers to guide
overall development in a metropolitan area.
A final verdict on the success of an open-ended metropolitan
approach begun as a single function agency cannot be
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United States. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. Intergovernmental responsibilities for water supply and sewage disposal in metropolitan areas., book, October 1962; Washington, D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1424/m1/71/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.