County consolidation: the zombie idea of Iowa government

Current law permits voluntary consolidation. That's as it should be.

Iowa’s DOGE task force, a Governor Reynolds creation channeling the 2025 federal DOGE Department headed until recently by Elon Musk, last week discussed the possible consolidation of counties in Iowa.

Various committees, commissions, boards, organizations, individual legislators, and other Iowans take up the idea every so often. The proposal, like a steer at the Iowa State Fair, gets eyeballed, patted down, and evaluated. But unlike a State Fair entry, county consolidation is then written up in a report, and mothballed for a few years until someone else reopens the concept.

Consolidation of counties is the zombie of Iowa think tanks. It doesn’t die, but it never really lives either. And there are good reasons for that.

One reason is that Iowans are not likely to sit still if a higher power, like the Iowa Legislature, tries to force a redraw of county lines without local permission. Section 331 of the Iowa Code provides for county consolidation under home rule as a power of local government. But the process must originate from within two or more counties themselves; it can’t be imposed by legislative fiat.

The specific wording in Section 331.253(1) reads: “Consolidation may be placed on the ballot only by a joint report by two or more counties.” That means the Legislature can’t do it, and it also means that one county can’t absorb another county against the other county’s wishes.

The process appears to resemble the formula for Iowa school district consolidation: the school boards of two or more districts propose consolidation, and then begin a complex and detailed step-by-step journey.

If two counties decided to merge, the Iowa Code sets forth what they must do: decide how their indebtedness, if any, is to be handled, how the elected offices of each county will merge, how public services will continue, what staffing arrangements are to be made, and as with school district mergers, where the offices and installations of the larger merged county will be located.

It’s significant that no such mergers have ever taken place in Iowa, nor have any been attempted, to my knowledge.

Regional organizations in some cases are warranted, for instance in mental health groupings and judicial districts. Those seem to work well most of the time.

But when consolidation is closely analyzed, it usually becomes clear that most of the cost of county government comes from its provision of services, not from administration.

For most, maybe all, counties in Iowa, the most costly departments are secondary roads and public safety. Roads will have to be maintained and sheriffs’ deputies will have to protect and help residents, regardless whether that’s done by two separate counties or a single larger one. The miles of road and the number of residents remain the same.

I would bet that most Iowans are comfortable with the present arrangement, where county officials and staffs are closer to home, and responsible to the voters of their own existing county, than the alternative.

Back in 1999, under Governor Tom Vilsack, a bipartisan 37-member appointed committee over a period of several months developed what was called the Iowa 2010 Strategic Plan, a detailed eight-division document designed to improve life for Iowans. Chuck Offenburger and myself were two of the committee members.

One of the provisions of the completed Plan read in part as follows: “The Iowa Association of Counties and the Iowa League of Cities (and potentially other stakeholders) should convene a process to explore realignment of county boundaries and county/city boundaries, on a case-by-case basis. This process should yield both the potential advantages and disadvantages of options for a re-alignment of counties and realignment to achieve metropolitan area government (consolidation of cities and surrounding suburbs . . .)”

That provision of the Plan remains just where it stood when it was released to the public, and the Legislature, 25 years ago: as a concept, not a reality.

It’s not hard to see why. The proposal left it up to local voters and jurisdictions to take the necessary steps to accomplish mergers. That hasn’t happened. And the result would have been the same had it instead authorized the Legislature to force the mergers: voters would in all likelihood have pushed back hard if their legislators tried to do so.

As I remember, divergence of opinion concerning county consolidation broke mainly along urban and rural lines among the committee members, with urban members more likely to support the idea. My recollection is that the initial proposal suggested merging the current 99 counties into 16 or so, sort of along the boundaries of the community colleges or the area education agencies.

But that was until some of us from rural areas said if county merger is a good idea, then the same is true for cities and their suburbs. Do we really need Waukee, and Cedar Falls, and Bettendorf? Why not just consolidate them into Des Moines, Waterloo, and Davenport in order to save tax dollars?

The discussion slowed considerably at that point, and the final result was the compromise wording cited above in this column, leaving it up to local jurisdictions themselves to make the crucial decisions, “on a case-by-case” basis as the plan sets forth. No such “case” has yet appeared.

Most Iowans appear to prefer the current county arrangement. Unless and until they want that to change, it should remain as is.