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hike_me t1_j6e6wo9 wrote

Reply to comment by IamSauerKraut in Say good-bye to Dennysville: de-organization under consideration by IamSauerKraut

I live on MDI. They partially resisted school consolidation and created an AOS. Each town has a school board and budget. Sharing teachers between schools in the AOS is a pain because they are all employees of the individual towns. Multiple towns had their own police chief and fire chief, which is finally merging. Separate code enforcement and planning. There really is no need for all this duplication of effort and services in a small geographic area.

Canada went through with a municipal amalgamation process that was successful

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IamSauerKraut OP t1_j6ef6tm wrote

MDI is likely a unique situation. Maine already has a countywide police force in its counties but even that is insufficient when you have towns/cities beyond a certain size. A significant number of towns have long relied solely on county deputies for law enforcement, but some towns have found that insufficient given the issues at the local level.

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hike_me t1_j6f6sr9 wrote

New England, including Maine has very weak counties. Outside of New England, the county is the default form of government. Areas can incorporate as a city and have their own police, etc but the default is to run everything at the county level.

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IamSauerKraut OP t1_j6g8ih9 wrote

>Outside of New England, the county is the default form of government.

Not sure this is true.

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hike_me t1_j6gaxyh wrote

In most states outside New England town government isn’t even really a thing (if town government exists it is extremely limited in power compared to the county). “Towns” are often unincorporated settlements and cities are the incorporated municipalities. In some cases you’ll even have enclaves of unincorporated areas in the middle of huge cities that refused to be annexed and continue to be administered at the county level (for example, Google map Houston and look at the border — that irregular shape is the result of annexing densely settled unincorporated areas) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_town

Houston https://maps.app.goo.gl/MkksCHaSkHagEwyv7?g_st=ic

Harris County, where Houston is located, has a bunch of unincorporated communities: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Harris_County_Texas_incorporated_and_unincorporated_areas_Houston_highlighted.svg

Check out how much of Los Angeles County (maybe the most populated county in the US?) is unincorporated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Los_Angeles_County,_California

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