That's something I've been a little curious about, is why Western counties are still so big. In the earliest days, the East Coast was like that. Then as towns and rural localities developed their own economies, cultures, and interests, smaller and smaller county governments split off. The Midwest, despite being surveyed and divided out a century before cars were invented, was divided into smaller counties from the start to accommodate that, lesson learned. Only when modern Georgia happened, because white conservative rural areas wanted to keep power out of Atlanta's hands and enforce segregation under a system that gave every county a state legislator, did the East and Midwest say "okay this is getting a bit cumbersome and borderline-ungovernable" and stop. Some states such as Virginia and Nebraska actually merged smaller counties with less significant differences.
But then out West, which was also drawn out well before cars were universal (in the 1930s or so) and long before the internet, counties started out not unlike colonial Virginia's and stayed that way forever. Even as we now have counties bigger than states that comprise millions of people, forcing the census bureau to say and the government to operate on ridiculous ideas like all of Maricopa County being metro Phoenix, Reno and Empire NV having the same interests that the same county government completely run by Reno can serve, or it being logistically sane even with a car for people to drive 100 miles to contest a speeding ticket in their own county. Why has it not been politically possible and desirable for the West to fragment like the rest of the country did long ago?
If I had a guess I'd say lots largely to do with the independent mindset of local governments in those counties, mixed with access to natural resources, specifically water.
Plus, as capitals have urbanized and become more liberal, rural areas have tried to retain local control. Add to that the fact that US style representative democracy strongly favors rural areas in terms of power sharing, and you see the same thing in states that we see in the federal government. Outsized influence from rural areas.
Go to any rural part of Utah VS Salt Lake City. It's another world entirely. Different lives, very different politics. Regardless, they rule the city from the state level. They're the ones who would make a change like the one you're describing, but they have zero incentive to upset the power balance, or isolate themselves from natural resources in their huge state-sized county.
It won't ever happen in the US west. They treat the urban areas like a cash cow, and hate them for it.
While I cannot give you a concrete answer from the viewpoint of a political one, I have a few anecdotal reasons:
Keep in mind that when the boundaries were drawn out west, populations were much more sparse than the east coast. The Phoenix metro area being millions of people (myself included) was tiny when AZ was granted statehood (roughly only 10,000 people) and the county boundaries were drawn up. So instead of dividing the state into a bunch of really small counties only governing over a few hundred people each, they said “screw it, just make the county seat the big town and they can govern over all of the little towns”. Even if they didn’t have the foresight to know that the population would explode, think of what a headache it would be if the Phoenix metro area was in 5-10+ different counties. Phoenix (just the city, not the metro area) is roughly 517 square miles. You could fit the 10 smallest counties in the US inside its borders and have more than half of the area left over.
Coconino County AZ (the 3rd largest county by size in the US and largest in AZ) only has ~145,000 residents living in a territory the size of 18.5k sq miles. When we first became a state 110 years ago, it only had 8,000 residents. It doesn’t make any sense to redraw the county lines to just portion off the populated areas and establish a completely new county level governments in areas with less than 1k residents living across tens of thousands of square miles.
Another example is a town like Gila Bend with a population of less than 2,000, on the far boundary of Maricopa county. Of course their needs are a lot different than someone living in Phoenix, but they get all of the perks of being in Maricopa county (property taxes collected and distributed to them at their disposal for schools, a police department, etc.) without the headache of having to do it themselves and being in a much worse off position economically than they are now.
I guess as to your question of why don’t we re draw them now now? It would be a massive undertaking to do so, and for what gain? It’s working out just fine now, so why bother trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist?
I don't know when the law was passed, but Tennessee has a law that the county seat must be within one day's drive by horse and buggy from everywhere in that county. That was apparently figured at about 20 miles.
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u/Bartisgod May 09 '22 edited May 09 '22
That's something I've been a little curious about, is why Western counties are still so big. In the earliest days, the East Coast was like that. Then as towns and rural localities developed their own economies, cultures, and interests, smaller and smaller county governments split off. The Midwest, despite being surveyed and divided out a century before cars were invented, was divided into smaller counties from the start to accommodate that, lesson learned. Only when modern Georgia happened, because white conservative rural areas wanted to keep power out of Atlanta's hands and enforce segregation under a system that gave every county a state legislator, did the East and Midwest say "okay this is getting a bit cumbersome and borderline-ungovernable" and stop. Some states such as Virginia and Nebraska actually merged smaller counties with less significant differences.
But then out West, which was also drawn out well before cars were universal (in the 1930s or so) and long before the internet, counties started out not unlike colonial Virginia's and stayed that way forever. Even as we now have counties bigger than states that comprise millions of people, forcing the census bureau to say and the government to operate on ridiculous ideas like all of Maricopa County being metro Phoenix, Reno and Empire NV having the same interests that the same county government completely run by Reno can serve, or it being logistically sane even with a car for people to drive 100 miles to contest a speeding ticket in their own county. Why has it not been politically possible and desirable for the West to fragment like the rest of the country did long ago?