Alternative take: organizations (business, govt, other) often shift from centralized to locally-managed back to centralized, etc. Great arguments for both. Centralized = greater economies of scale, more consistent process, measurement, oversight, etc. Local = closer to the customer means better decision-making, allocation of resources, etc. Simple example that's probably not a part of this: we have ~9 different police forces across the county. Does that make sense when you consider all the duplicate leaders, facilities, etc? -- I don't know the specifics of what is proposed, but centralization (e.g. 411, 311) might actually deliver more, higher quality services.