So What ARE Best Practices for Merging a City with Three Villages?

We're going to hope that the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission knows - and I have every reason to believe that they do. I've spoken with them in the past about doing a resident survey for Pepper Pike (which, much to my chagrin, as many know, has in fact never been done - but that's another blog) and the folks I spoke with a couple of times were, truly, excellent. Also, I would imagine that since Orange Village's mayor, Kathy Mulcahy, is on the board of the CCPC, well - that couldn't hurt, I hope.

However, and no surprise to anyone, not content to wait for others to get started, I've sent out a APB to my gov20 friends and also have started to browse around myself. Anyone can do this and it's fascinating to see what's out there - I'm not going to post every single thing I look through though I am saving most in an electronic file just to refer back to.  But for example, here's a 2003 document from the University of Wisconsin's Local Government Center called, "Merger of City-Village Services: Best Practices."

In other words, while this may be somewhat rare and new around here, it's been studied and been done before, elsewhere.  Reinventing the wheel isn't necessary, but re-tooling and modifying it to fit our circumstances? I'm sure.