It won't happen

In an ideal world, Birmingham and its suburbs could merge into one big happy family and work together to promote economic development, governmental efficiency, and quality-of-life improvements for the entire region.

But in this world, municipalities bicker at each other all the time. In this world, many people in the greater Birmingham area care about the Magic City only to the extent that it's a place to go to work five times a week. In this world, the region's residents, like the inhabitants of many other major metropolitan areas across the country, still are divided largely along racial and class lines, even though no one much likes to talk about it.

For those reasons and more, the metro-government referendum bill that state Rep. John Rogers, D-Birmingham, will propose next year won't make it very far.