Cities by Contract: The Politics of Municipal Incorporation

The battle line in the urban conflict lies between the central city and the affluent suburb. The city, needing to broaden its tax base in order to provide increasingly necessary social services, has sought to annex the suburb. The latter, in order to hold down property taxes, has sought independence through incorporation.

Cities by Contract documents and dissects this process through case studies of communities located in Los Angeles County. The book traces the incorporation of "Lakewood Plan" cities, municipalities which contract with the county for the provision of basic—which is to say minimal—services.

The Lakewood plan is shown in this book to be a precursor of the full-scale tax revolt that was to break out a generation later. Miller points out that the settlers of these communities "voted with their feet" for lower taxes, lower levels of government spending on welfare and other social services, and a lower degree of bureaucratic intrusion into their affairs, much as in 1978 Californians statewide were to express the same desires and objectives at the ballot box by overwhelmingly backing the Jarvas-Gann initiative, Proposition 13.

The book is one of the first on urban politics to combine the modeling techniques of microeconomics with the statistical analysis of data taken from interviews and documents. Still, the essential messages of the book are fully carried by its prose arguments and by the case studies.