The emergence and rapid spread of business improvement districts ("BIDs") is one of the most important recent developments in American cities. BIDs have been controversial, with both supporters and proponents viewing the districts as part of a trend toward the privatization of the public sector. By examining the legal and political structures that determine BID formation, functions, finances and governance, this Article determines that BIDs are not private entities but are, instead, a distinctive hybrid of public and private elements. Moreover, although the particular fusion of public and private institutions, values and concerns embodied in the BID is unique, Professor Briffault demonstrates that an interplay of public and private themes is a longstanding tradition in American local government law. BIDs depart from the norm of democratic governance and they raise questions concerning equity in the delivery of local services. BiDs, however, are ultimately subject to municipal control and they provide a mechanism for providing the public services and investment that financially strapped cities need if they are to survive. With appropriate municipal oversight and limits, BIDs, and the experimentation in combining public and private roles that BiDs represent, can make a significant contribution to the quality of urban public life.
4, at 283, 285. 6. PEIRE, supra note 3, at 81. Contemporary metropolitan regions are far larger than the metropolitan cities of the start of this century. As Robert Fishman points out: "Where the leading metropolises of the early 20th century-New York, London, or Berlin-covered perhaps 100 square miles, the new city [or the metropolitan region] routinely encompasses two to three thousand square miles. Within such 'urban regions,' each element is correspondingly enlarged." Robert Fishman,
Professor Ellickson is aware of the centrality of suburbs to American local government law. See Ellickson, Suburban Growth Controls: An Economic and Legal Analysis, 86 Yale LJ. 385 (1977) [hereinafter "Growth Controls"]. Nevertheless, when he addresses the issue of local public power generally he writes of "cities." 8. G. Clark, Judges and the Cities: Interpreting Local Autonomy (1985). The title of Professor Williams's examination, The Constitutional Vulnerability of American Local Government: The Politics of City Status in American Law, 1986 Wis. L. Rev. 83, also assumes the equation of "local government" with "city," although within the body of her article she criticizes the practice of "lumping together these disparate [local] entities into one legal category .... " Id. at 83 n.1. divisions of counties. There were 19,076 municipalities and 3,041 counties. Id. 10. As Robert Dahl observed in criticizing the use of the term "city" to describe local governments too large for effective participatory democracy, "names conceal reali
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