In the 1980's and 1990's functional consolidations for City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County services were successfully used to reduce costs, improve service and save tax dollars.

During the 1980s, 14 major services were consolidated, including Building Standards, Planning, Purchasing, Utility, Animal Control, Emergency Management, Crime Lab, Action Line, First Responder, E-911, Landfills, Veterans Service, Elections Office, Tax Listings and Tax Collections.

In the 1990s, Parks and Recreation and Police Services were added to the list of successful City –County consolidations.

Even though the consolidation efforts were a success the City felt that more needed to be done to streamline services costs. So, in 1993 the City established three (3) citizen task forces.

• The Mayor's Organization Task Force was charged with reviewing the City's organizational structure.
• The Mayor's Compensation Task Force was established to review employee compensation plans.
•  The Mayor's Privatization Task Force was asked to review and design a plan to test privatization of services and assets. The work of this group brought the concept of managed competition to the City of Charlotte.

Because of work done by the Mayor's Organizational Task Force, the City of Charlotte is now broken up into 14 Key Business Units or KBUs. Each KBU acts as a separate business within the City's organizational structure with a Key Business Executive making independent decisions about how their KBU will be run.

Each year all KBU's develop a competition plan outlining what services they would like to compete with the private sector during the coming year. The Mayor's Privatization Task Force recommended the creation of the Privatization and Competition Advisory Committee.