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Fictional Municipality/County Changes

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NWI_Irish96:
Have an idea for splitting/merging counties, cities or towns? Post them here.

Specific ideas:

1) Split Cook County, Illinois into three areas. One would be a standalone city/county consisting of exactly the city limits of Chicago (a la Indianapolis, Nashville, etc.). The other two would be the rest of the county, split roughly by North Avenue, with the entirety of Melrose Park with the southern part and the entirety of North lake with the northern part. (Yes, the northern county would have three disconnected segments.)

Rationale: Chicago is plenty large enough to not need separate city and county governments, and the current county government has too much power as it is.

2) Reconfigure Clark and Floyd counties, including a merger of Jeffersonville, Clarksville and New Albany. Specifically, all of Jeffersonville Township, the parts of Utica and Silver Creek townships that are currently part of Jeffersonville or Clarksville, and all of New Albany township become part of a reorganized Clark county and the new city of Falls City. The rest of both counties become part of the reorganized Floyd County.

Rationale: Individually, none of Jeffersonville, Clarksville or New Albany is over 50,000, but the merged city would be over 100,000 and be much more recognizable statewide.

General ideas:

3) In states like Indiana, where Townships are holdovers from the days when it took too long to get to the county seat by horse, they are now essentially a worthless level of government that wastes tax dollars. Get rid of them. I understand that in many states, Townships serve more of a purpose so I'm not advocating it in those cases.

4) Any county that both has a population < 50,000 and a size of < 500 square miles should merge with another county. There is a redundancy in county level services and a waste of tax dollars.

Max Rockatansky:
Split northern San Bernardino County into Needles County or maybe Mojave County?  I would probably CA 58, I-15 CA 247 and CA 62 as the rough boundary for the new county.  I would possibly put the communities in San Bernardino County along CA 62 into Riverside County or add another county based around Coachella Valley.

gonealookin:
It has been discussed in the Lake Tahoe area.  Washoe County, Carson City and Douglas County all touch the lake and have valley areas, separated by a ridge which varies from about 7100 feet to over 10,000 feet elevation.  There's no real commonality between lake and valley sections, either economically or sociologically.  So the lake portions have proposed secession and merger as a single "Lake Tahoe County" in Nevada.

It's not a realistic proposal because a lot of visitor tax money flows over that ridge from the lake down into the valley, and the valley sections are much more populous and would never give up that source of revenue.


--- Quote ---4) Any county that both has a population < 50,000 and a size of < 500 square miles should merge with another county. There is a redundancy in county level services and a waste of tax dollars.
--- End quote ---

We do this to some extent with certain services that are pooled among several Nevada counties.  For example, Carson City Health and Human Services (think restaurant inspections in particular but they played a big role in the Covid response) serves not just Carson City but also Storey, Lyon and Douglas counties.

Big John:
Split Fulton County GA into 3 counties.  It has 3 distinct different purposes.

skluth:
The counties of So Cal would probably be much different if they were designed to make more sense. The desert regions are all quite different from the coastal communities which are different from the agriculture communities. The Inland Empire is different from all the above.

Riverside (where I live) should be divided into three counties; everything west of the Badlands, San Gorgonio Pass and Coachella Valley, and everything from Chiriaco Summit east. The first two would be their own counties, while the east end would be combined with Imperial County. Imperial County would add the eastern parts of both Riverside and San Bernardino Counties so the entire Colorado River Basin would be in one county. The Mojave Desert parts of San Bernardino and LA Counties (essentially everything north of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains) would be a new county which might also include the bit of Kern County SE of the Tehachapi Mountains. The area around Yucca Valley-Joshua Tree could pick which of the three surrounding counties (its current county of San Bernardino or one of two new counties which I'll dub Coachella and Mojave) or possibly yet another new county (Joshua Tree with a county seat at Yucca Valley). The expanded Imperial County might also want to split at the Colorado Basin and Salton Sea Basin line; I'll call that county Colorado County. Not sure where the new county seats might be, possibly Indio (Coachella as there are already some county government branch offices there), Barstow (Mojave), and Blythe (Colorado).

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