Regionalism and Overcoming Barriers
To Cooperation Among Localities :::

On Nov. 29, 2006, Otis White lead a workshop on regionalism and cooperation among localities for the Iowa State Association of Counties for ISAC's Fall School in Des Moines.  More than 100 county officials attended the workshop.

In the workshop, we did three things:

• Otis talked about regionalism in general and the findings of a special survey of Iowa county officials about intergovernmental cooperation.
• He offered participants a fictional "case study" or scenario posing three common cooperation problems and asked participants to work in small groups on strategies for addressing these problems.
• Participants framed their solutions, we posted them on a wall and talked about their merits and, at the end of the session, participants voted (using colored dots) on the solutions they thought were most workable.

On this page, we have posted five documents from the workshop.  There is Otis' PowerPoint presentation, which offers some general thoughts about regionalism and cooperation and reports the highlights of the survey.  There are two handouts from the workshop: the case study that Otis designed for participants to work on in groups, and a brief list of ways around obstacles to regionalism. There are the detailed results of the survey, including all the comments of participants. And there is the workshop report, including the strategies suggested by the small groups and the dot voting at the end.

Finally, there are photographs from the workshop, showing Otis leading the session, small groups working on strategies and the dot voting process.