2017 SJR 31: Combined City/County Government, Article XI

What SJR 31 does

Senate Joint Resolution No. 31 was introduced by Senator Knopp.  This measure proposes to change Article XI, entitled Corporations and Internal Improvements, Section 2a of the Oregon State Constitution.  This allows municipalities of greater than 500,000 population to essentially become their own counties.  There is also a provision that if there is a municipality that is greater than 700,000, that it can be split so long as the pieces all have more than 100,000 people in them.

My View

I wrote about Section 2a, Article IX here.  There is indeed a problem in that there are multiple levels of government which can end up being redundant.  For large urban areas, the city government, out of need of co-ordination and economies of scale, end up doing a lot of what the county government is responsible for.  Here in Oregon, at least we really only have one particularly serious instance of the question, that being the city of Portland in Multnomah county, although I think that the city also extends into Washington County in a few places.  Overall, having a large urban center being a county all by itself could really be a good thing, however, changing borders is always fraught with emotions and trivial emotional concerns that can end up as effective roadblocks since changing borders on a few things would achieve exactly the same as this proposed amendment.
Subsection (4) of the proposal is virtually a gilded invitation for the rich neighborhoods to secede from the rest of the urban area and is really a bad idea.  Because of that, in its current form, this proposed amendment has got to be a no.