Thinking out loud here... I understand city dwellers’ anger and frustration with getting out-voted by rural populations. However, the root of the problem is in the antiquated arrangement of city and county governments. Replacing counties with regional governments offers a way to remedy this bizarre arrangement.
There are 3,142 counties in the U.S. and each one has its own bureaucracy to support.
Incorporated cities are situated inside county boundaries, but function like independent island governments - IOW, counties have no control over cities and vice versa. The result of this arrangement is a fierce competition between city and county governments.
Rather than cooperating for the "common good" cities and counties compete for tax revenue necessary to support their own bureaucracies including elected officials and government jobs.
As an example, let’s use big box retailers, like WalMart or Home Depot. Big box stores generate resale, property and other tax revenue, making them “valuable” to both city and county governments. If the big box builds inside city limits, the city gets the tax revenue. The vast majority of WalMart customers may live in the county and drive into the city to shop, but county government gets cheated out of the tax revenue.
To persuade WalMart to build on county lands, counties offer free land, free infrastructure, free services, property tax relief, etc. In turn, cities offer “deals” of their own. In the meantime, WalMart waits until cities and counties battle it out, then take the best offer. More often than not, the only difference is which side of the road Walmart builds on (one side of a road is city land and the other side of the same road is county land). That’s how big box retailers - and big employers, like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. – get so much free stuff, paid for by their customers – through local taxes. State government gets into the “economic development competition” as well. In this competition between local and state governments, citizens lose every time – they aren’t even in the game.
When county boundaries were drawn the vast majority of citizens lived in the country – NOT cities. As people moved out of rural areas and into cities, we got stuck with an antiquated system of local government they left behind.
If you look at a map, most county lines are straight: That’s because county lines were drawn around populations – not the landscape/geography. What got left out of this equation was the land itself. And to a large extent, that is the root cause of severe environmental degradation which is the root cause of climate change.
There is nothing straight about geography. Geography curves and undulates, meaning several different counties, cities, even states control a region’s natural resources, including watersheds, aquifers, mountain ranges, prairies, valleys, farm farmland and ranch lands, oil fields, mines etc.
Replacing county governments with regional governments offers huge, unprecedented benefits. First of all, it would reduce the “cost” of government so fast, people would notice immediately. Secondly, it would reduce, even end, big corporations that play the tax incentive game. Best of all, it could provide for the sound management of natural resources that all of us, city and rural residents alike, depend on to survive (things like clean water, healthy food, and clean air).
Another example, geographically speaking, California’s central valley is a region. However, there are nine counties in this region, plus state and federal lands. The Mojave desert and Appalachia are regions, and yet each one of these regions is controlled by numerous counties and states – that prioritize their own tax revenues and can’t agree on anything. I’d like to see regional governments whose mission is land and natural resource management – rather than housing developments and resale taxes.
Anyways, that’s my train of thought …
