The Census Bureau's Role in Research On Special Districts: a Critique

n 1957 John Bollens introduced his pioneering study of special districts by noting that they had become new of American politics (1957: 1). In the three decades since the publication of Bollens' study, social scientists have investigated and debated various aspects of the growing reliance by state and local governments on special districts. But many areas of this dark continent remain unexplored. In 1982, as part of one of its own periodic reports on special districts, the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) noted that these entities constituted the fasting growing, most varied--but least studied--type of American government (1982: 356). The ACIR, and others, have called for more in-depth, comparative state studies of special districts. But the features of this dark continent, however vaguely sketched by Bollens, the ACIR and others, may be considerably less clear than even these authors contend. Although the Census Bureau has been the principal source of the definitions, classification scheme and data used in these and many similar studies since the 1950s, systematic evaluations by independent researchers of the Bureau's approach to the study of special districts are not included in these studies, nor do they appear anywhere in the research literature on this subject. This paper reviews some of the controversies surrounding the proliferation of special districts, and the prominent role of the Census Bureau in the history of research on this topic. The Bureau's methods for defining and classifying special districts are evaluated. The quality of the Bureau's information on special districts is found to be seriously compromised in a number of ways, particularly from the standpoint of public policy research. For example, up to thirty percent of some types of districts counted by the Bureau are functionally inactive. The failure to count hundreds of districts engaged in public works financing results in the Bureau incorrectly categorizing as state obligations 42 percent of the special district debt issued for public works purposes. This discussion concludes with some of the implications of this evaluation: many existing studies of special districts based on Census Bureau infor-