Durhamites experience local government unlike many others in North Carolina. The City of Durham, with nearly 300,000 residents and growing, is the only major municipality inside the Durham County border, with all due respect to our friends in Bahama, Rougemont, and the dozen or so people in Chapel Hill this side of the Orange County line. Both governing bodies also share the same name. In North Carolina, only the 48,000 residents of Wilson—the most populous city in Wilson County and the county seat—can breathe that same rarified air.
The City of Durham and Durham County offer distinct services. Paying your water bill? Make the check out to the city. Signing up for food assistance? Those are issued by the county. Calling law enforcement? The police or the sheriff could show up at your front door, depending on where the action took place.
The two governments are no strangers to collaboration, though. City and county staff often partner on planning and development, transportation, and emergency services, among other areas, through joint city-county departments, resource sharing agreements, and jointly supported commissions and organizations.
With so much interconnectivity and overlap in their constituency—only about 13% of Durham County residents live outside city limits—the city and county should consider moving past the dating phase and settle down, make it official. Consolidate the two governments into one civil union, with all 300,000-plus residents as witnesses.
Durham has flirted with consolidation throughout its history, in the 30s, 40s, 50s and—most recently—in 1974 and 2000.
In the 70s, proponents of consolidation—mostly state and local officials—saw an opportunity to streamline services and increase efficiency. Opponents feared integrating the majority Black city schools with the mostly white county schools. Voters struck down the proposal by a two-to-one margin, with an overwhelming majority of residents outside city limits voting against. Warren J. Wicker, a longtime professor and faculty member at the UNC School of Government, summarized the effort, forecasting that consolidation might be more palatable if two important steps were taken first.
“Immediately after the vote some Durham officials said that the idea of consolidation had not been killed but probably had been put to rest for several years,” Wicker wrote in 1975. “They expect that another attempt will not be made until after the city annexes more of the fringe area around it and, perhaps, until after the schools are merged. These two steps are seen as probably necessary before a majority of Durham voters will favor city-county consolidation.”
In 2000, a new commission was formed to revisit consolidation. But this time it didn’t make it to voters; city and county officials nixed the idea. Rural residents felt a merger would be more like a “takeover” by the city, according to summary documents. Political organizers were concerned about equitable representation on the new joint governing board. Lastly, the sheriff at the time, Worth L. Hill, seemed uninclined to relinquish control and collaborate even more on a unified law enforcement operation with the city police.
Decades have passed since those proposals were brought forth. Durham merged its public school system in 1992, and much to the chagrin of organizers with Preserve Rural Durham and other longtime county residents, the city has gobbled up thousands of acres of county land through annexation in the years since consolidation was last floated.
So what would stop us today from unifying the City of Durham and Durham County?
In many ways, this process would be no different than any corporate merger. The newly formed agency would need a rebrand; anything with a logo on it—letterheads, trucks, uniforms, fancy pens—would have to be redone. Redundancies in personnel would be eliminated. The list of things that would be cut or consolidated is expansive and expensive, at least in the short term.
But the new government of Durham, with its unified vision unburdened by unnecessary bureaucracy, could formalize the teamwork that is already routine practice between the two organizations, and streamline coordination across agencies with overlapping responsibilities.
It’s no coincidence that it was government officials who pushed consolidation before: They have a front row seat to the inefficiencies created by extra meetings, parallel departments, and redundant expenditures. At a city council work session in May, city councilor Matt Kopac floated the concept of consolidation during a discussion about changes to the electoral process in Durham. He won’t be the last public official to raise the idea, whether in the town square or private conversation, as others have done to me in recent years.
The savings and efficiency from consolidation is not guaranteed, and would likely be marginal, says Suzanne Leland, a professor of public policy at UNC Charlotte. Leland has studied consolidation efforts across the country, and makes the case that merging governments does not magically solve every issue. In fact, the financial and organizational benefits may yield too far in the future to justify the upfront costs and headache to constituents.
And yet, would it not still be better than the headaches we suffer now?
Earlier this year, the city of Durham had to scramble to adjust its budget projections—and make some difficult sacrifices—after county officials told them late in the game that the incoming tax revenue would be lower than anticipated due to property value reductions for certain commercial properties. Would a merged city-county government with one budget office have been able to prevent the issue?
Even if consolidation offers only marginal benefits, the clarity around how to engage with our local government, and the increased efficiency of day-to-day operations might be enough to sway voters. The combined Durham government would be a one-stop shop for constituent services, and a unified front against external agitators like ICE and data centers.
In true government fashion, consolidation would take time and require wading through years of bureaucracy, but we wouldn’t be going in completely blind. Two hours away, the city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County have flirted with the same will they, won’t they for years, but have yet to fully commit, instead offering similar unified functions to Durham like a merged school system. Residents in Louisville and Kansas City have successfully tied the knot.
Durham will likely continue to explore opportunities to deepen relationships between various departments without taking things all the way, but if history is any indication, every couple of decades the two government agencies start to look longingly into each other’s eyes and dream of a life together, with a shared mortgage and joint custody over 340,000 residents.
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