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I thought Miami/Dade County was bad, but the average PA county puts it to shame

Not to mention 501 school districts.

yes for noble simplification reasons and also because it would be very funny to watch places like Lower Merion get subsumed into actual Philadelphia.

In PA, even consolidating to the school district boundaries would be a huge improvement.

oh and if you pay taxes in rural PA (Evans City for example) your taxes basically go to A Guy and you can hire H&R Block and they're like "there's no public listing for how to pay your taxes, but we have a Pennsylvania Whisperer who knows how much you owe". similar problem with RITA in Ohio.

We have more than 1,200 law enforcement agencies. Most departments don't use NIBRS, so we don't have robust, real-time data on crime that can be shared and analyzed. It's a real problem!

oh, boy, New Englanders would not be happy with their loss of "local control." Vermont is trying to do school consolidation right now, and it's not going well. Geography is a bitch.

God only knows how it’s like in New Jersey

My country had several local government reforms within lifetime of my mom, crazy how some countries don't really do that.

It’s beautiful

If we can't get Wall and Wilmerding to merge (they tried and failed, there are funny stories), the idea that the state constitution and/or the hearts and minds of suburbanites change enough to allow anything like that is sadly science fiction.

that can be a mixed bag, Toronto does this to the extreme and it got them Mayor Rob Ford

Pittsburgh should be all of Allegheny county.

PA not having municipal consolidation is the root of like a third of the state’s problem (PSP overfunding is the other 2/3rds)

The DOJ report after Ferguson I found most interesting was the investigation that revealed that MO was shattered into a million districts that functioned like somehwere beteween Roman tax farmers and ancien regime France

Cannot afford to lose Upper and Lower Saucon as a way to get my friends back after a ligma joke.

In Wake County (the most populous county in North Carolina) we have 16 different municipalities

People love to complain about the property taxes in NJ but the fact is we have 564 municipalities in this state and each one of them has its own police department, school district, and DPW, and as soon as you bring up consolidation people get mad at you

The crazy thing is there's already a municipal government at roughly the right level (the township) and they currently do nothing.

You can thank Lakewood California for this btw. They even brag about this curious development of municipal law (that just by a huge coincidence was developed the same year Brown v Board was passed). www.lakewoodca.gov/About/Our-Hi...

I feel like that is what Pennsylvania was created for though

King of Prussia is going to absorb the entire state in a war/unification campaign that seizes key territory in eastern Ohio

So much fun living next to a private fief

Los Angeles and Orange County is basically 140 zoning scams in a trench coat