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IS THAT MAP CRACKLED OR WHAT?
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People who have been following Strike Me Pink know that I've been advocating
such reforms for this country as moving the Supreme Court out of Washington
and moving the FBI out of the Justice Department. Today I'd like to make
another contribution to progress by tackling another question that would repay the
attention of the public if once it were brought to bear on it. In almost four
hundred years it never has been.
It first got my attention a few years ago when I was in Florida working on a
road map to find the best route to get to Brunswick, Georgia. I noticed the
Georgia map looked like a bathroom floor. It was cut up into little squares,
rectangles, tetrahedrons and parallelograms that made it look like a geometry
text more than a road map. I found out that I was looking at the Georgia
counties, all 159 of them. 159! What could they possibly want with them? New York
had over three times the population of Georgia and got along with only
sixty-two counties. Was this necessary? Was Georgia the only jigsaw puzzle or were
there others? Should something be done about it?
Taking the questions in reverse order, maybe something should be done about
it, but up to now nothing has. That's in four hundred years, as I said, if you
start with the East Coast, where quite a few of the counties date from the
seventeenth century. I have never seen anything in print expressing an opinion
one way or another on whether we need the 3,351 of them that we have, even
though there has been discussion of consolidation of towns and cities to eliminate
duplication of services they provide. The counties remain untouched.
As for a national pattern, well Georgia hasn't been the only state to go
mosaic. Somehow one knows that Texas has been there too and of course outdone
everyone else. The Lone Star has hatched a total of 254 starlets, so that none
of its twenty million citizens will feel lost in all the space, but each of
them will have its own little subdivision to feel at home in.
Kentucky was right behind Georgia when all this started and cut itself up in
120 counties as soon as it was admitted to the Union in the early nineteenth
century. Since I'm not writing a history here, I'll only say that the trend
continued with most of the new states admitted after that, with some unexpected
exceptions like California, which confined itself to a moderate number of
counties, and Arizona, the last state admitted before Alaska and Hawaii, which
only had fifteen counties. The final two states are in single figures, since
Alaska, with unlimited space to create counties, has no people to put in them,
with the result that its handful of counties are the country's biggest, but also
its emptiest. Hawaii has five islands, making five counties.
What's behind this of course, is politics. The three thousand plus counties
are each entitled to a county court. This means a courthouse, with a judge
presiding. The judge needs a clerk. He needs a bailiff. He needs a court
reporter. He needs a janitor to keep the courthouse running. He might combine the
clerk, reporter and janitor, but he still has two jobs to offer. Here I'm
talking about the barest minimum, to be found in a county of eight thousand or
so people in an over-countied state like Kentucky.
The minimums have nothing to do with megacounties like Los Angeles, our
biggest, with nine and a half million people. All the same jobs exist, but in
multiples of thousands and subdivisions of hundreds. L.A. obviously needs all the
help it can get, and is probably understaffed if anything. The waste and
duplication would come at a lower level, where there are whole structures of
county government, not just courts, which are topheavy for the amount of work they
do, and could produce a saving by being merged with their neighbors.
My own impression is that sometimes governments have been merged, but not
courts. I leave it at that. I bring up subjects in this space that have caught
my attention, but about which I don't feel obliged to become an expert. If I
stimulate someone else to become one, I've done my bit.
We could use a few experts. The subject of "County Government" returns a
blank when entered in a library computer. I found exactly two books when I did
it. And yet counties are becoming more important all the time with the growth
of suburbs. They're getting more interesting too. Where I live we have
government scandals that are a match for anything that happens in New York. That's
progress.
Doing my crash course on counties I was happy to see that one American
tradition is going strong and shows no sign of weakening. Thirty-one counties in
this country are named for George Washington.
In the state of Washington though, it appears that someone has been playing
games. The local Indians seem to have sold the palefaces a bill of goods when
it came to attaching names to the counties they formed. As a result
Washington has counties named Snohomish, Kititas, Skamania, Wahkiskua, Whatcorn,
Cowlitz (come on!), and Klickitat. I think the redmen had been listening to a
little white cussing and fed it back to the intruders when they were consulted
about the names of the local landmarks. Who said Indians have no sense of humor?
Kititas indeed.
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