JW, if duplication of effort is a concern, why not merge the cities of Olympia and Tumwater entirely and eliminate all the redundancies? Doing it by creating an entire new special purpose district certainly creates more administrative overhead costs than the status quo or merging the cities completely.
One of the concerns this RFA proposal prompts is one over the way special purpose districts reduce democratic control by creating a single-focus board with taxing authority over city voters but only one mission — their special purpose.
The voters thus have to keep on eye on two separate elected boards, with one having the full range of programs to be concerned with but the other only to serve its own program needs, and that second one freed from having to go through the full city budget process to compete for funds.
Responsible city governance means the elected officials have to go through the difficult but necessary process of weighing all the competing needs and balancing all the needs across all the programs vs all the resources at the same time and making the tradeoffs necessary because there’s not unlimited resources.
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