Valuable Partnerships

Valuable Partnerships: Cooperation, Innovation, and the Future of Municipal Texas bridges rich scholarship and practical application to produce an important reference for local government scholars and practitioners alike by covering the dynamic approaches altering how Texas municipalities operate. Valuable Partnerships investigates the efficacy of the American fragmented municipal model comprised of 89,000 jurisdictions. Critics consistently criticize this decentralized model while arguing for a regional structure yielding greater efficiencies and scalability that also solves the twin problems of equity and service delivery inequalities.
Conversely, Valuable Partnerships presents evidence that Texas local governments leverage regional cooperation and innovation to achieve these results without the political and structural upheaval. The author utilizes historic analysis, benchmark results, socioeconomic measures, and budgetary data to demonstrate how Texas governments increase service performance and reduce the burden to taxpayers. Such results support a counter thesis to the structural regionalism hypothesis by presenting findings that Texas local jurisdictions embracing regional cooperation and data analytics will experience the same benefits.

Robert J. Sullivan currently serves as Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Dallas Baptist University. His research and writing focus includes public policy, federalism, municipal government, and innovative leadership. Valuable Partnerships is his first book.