“Northern Kentucky is bigger than Lexington and Bowling Green combined.”
If you’ve ever talked to Brent Cooper, you’ve probably heard him say this. Cooper is the president and CEO of the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, which works to support local businesses and promote a vibrant economy.
And he is proud to champion the region to anyone who will listen.
This story is part of our latest Super Issue, which takes a look at what it costs NKY to stay separate. Click here to learn more.
While Cooper said working together is Northern Kentucky’s super power, he also thinks the region would benefit significantly from expanding its ability to advocate for its cities and counties.
What exactly that would look like could take many forms. There already exist organizations such as the OneNKY Alliance and meetNKY, which advocate for the region in various ways. There’s also the idea of consolidation, ranging from some version of a city-county merger similar to Louisville to an interlocal agreement allowing NKY’s counties to formally govern together.
“A lot of people think two people in a room can get a lot more done than 100 and sometimes I agree with that,” said Cooper, who thinks he may have stolen the line from a Marvel movie. “That is true, unless you have to move a piano.”
To continue with the analogy, Cooper said, Northern Kentucky has a lot of pianos that need to be moved – and no single city or county can do that on their own.
Louisville and Jefferson County voters approved a merger in 2000. It became official in 2003, and Louisville’s Mayor, Jerry Abramson, was elected the first mayor of the consolidated Louisville Metro.
Greg Fischer succeeded him, serving from 2011 to 2023. In an interview for a 2019 Connecticut Mirror story about consolidation, Fischer said the merger streamlined government and strengthened economic development.
“We speak with one voice, the benefit of which cannot be overstated,” Fischer said in that interview.
Proponents of a merger often cite this shared voice as a way to better advocate for lower taxes and more federal and state funding. A merger is also seen as a way to consolidate police and fire services, and even schools.
Opponents point to community identity and a sense of place that could be lost if they are blended into a larger city or county. A community made up of smaller governments, some say, makes those governments more accessible.
“Often we talk about ‘we have too many cities,’” said Shane Noem, the founder and president of Roebling Solutions. “But at the same time, we can influence our schools and cities easily because they are accessible and we can run for those offices because they are easily accessible.”
Noem did not share an opinion about whether a merger is or isn’t a good idea, but this sentiment of creating a more accessible community came up often in our reporting for this Super Issue.
We have broached the topic before, talking to those who believe the region would have more say at the statehouse or others who say they don’t like the idea because of how it could affect taxes. We’ve looked at the pros and the cons, and how other places, like Louisville, have made things work.
It’s an amorphous idea, something that can be hard to really get your brain around. One could just as easily understand how keeping a city small and independent maintains a sense of home as how a bigger official region could create more opportunity.
For this Super Issue, we decided to do something different: We looked at the numbers. We wanted to know:
How much does it cost for Northern Kentucky to be three separate counties, with 36 different cities? How much does it cost to have 13 public school districts; a patchwork of public safety services stretching across the region; and taxing categories one business owner called a ‘logistical nightmare’?
From certain angles, what we found looks like Northern Kentucky is benefitting from its unique makeup and should keep on chugging. From other angles, it looks like consolidation is a necessary endeavor to move the region forward.
Isn’t it obvious that one big school district would have fewer costs than 13 smaller ones?
Turns out, that’s a lot more complicated to answer than it seems, Northern Kentucky University Professor Ginni Fair told us.
“I think that the approach to the whole discussion really depends on regional priorities and the issues, and it’s such a multifaceted concept,” Fair said.
An ability to share things like mental health resources or occupational therapists would be a huge plus, but that doesn’t necessarily come from consolidating schools, Fair said.
Closing one district may lower costs for that community directly, but those costs have to be picked up somewhere.
“You have to have more staff,” Fair said. “It’s not an absorption that happens without the increase in needing staff too.”
Go here to find out what it costs to educate Northern Kentucky’s students – and whether it might be cheaper if there were fewer districts.
Adding numbers that exist is one thing, but it’s harder to determine how much money a region isn’t getting.
Federal and state funding systems often take population into account when considering how to allocate money, and advocates for consolidation say this is hurting the region’s ability to bring in funding for some of our most vulnerable.
“It’s impossible to know what we’re missing out on,” Cooper said. “These grants don’t come out and say, ‘See, you didn’t apply, and so you lost X amount of money.’”
But Northern Kentucky is definitely bringing in federal and state dollars, thanks to a collection of people and organizations dedicated to collaboration within the region and outside of it.
Learn more about how NKY compares to other Kentucky cities when it comes to how funding is allocated, and whether that’s costing us, here.
Speaking of complicated: We could fill up our website explaining the nuances of tax codes in Northern Kentucky and you’d still be confused.
We set out to learn whether we’d save money if there were fewer regulations, codes or taxing districts. Some of us would, we found out, and some of us wouldn’t. The answer is nuanced, but might help you decide your opinion on the situation.
Here, we look at local taxing systems, how consolidation could work, and whether it would save money for Northern Kentuckians.
While some areas, like Cincinnati, have a more consolidated public safety system, Northern Kentucky has a collection of public safety agencies spread across its three counties.
We learned of successful consolidations that have already happened between public safety departments in NKY, and we compared what our costs look like in NKY compared to other cities in Kentucky. Go here to learn how much it costs to fund public safety in NKY.
Brent Cooper sits on the Managing Board of LINK nky, which oversees the business operations of LINK but has no say in editorial matters.