The Georgia Legislature has taken up the subject of consolidating its 159 (way too many) counties.
While I doubt anything will happen this year, I think they will be forced to shed counties in the medium term.
To compare:
Florida, much larger population - 67 counties
Alabama - 67 counties
Pennsylvania - 67 counties
North Carolina, roughly the same population, 100 counties
Only Texas has more counties at 254.
California makes do with 58.
Population decline in rural counties has forced the Georgia Legislature to take action.
72 counties in Georgia are under 20,000 in population. Simply requiring these small counties to merge with each other or with larger counties until all counties are above 20,000 in population would go along way to solving this issue. 87 counties would remain, still too many, but at least reasonable and the counties would have a sufficient tax base to operate efficiently.
It will be interesting to see how this works out.
Interestingly, the reason for having so many counties was supposedly a farmer on a horse could make it to the county seat and back in a day.
The main problem is simple inefficiency. Many of those counties have less than 20,000 people, no significant industry. Many don’t even have a Walmart.
Government can and should be scaled up for efficiency.
EDIT: Meant to put 20,000 rather than 3,000, fixed.
Off the top of my head I’d say tax base to support the functions of government. Such as:
Maintenance of county roads,
Election infrastructure,
Schools,
Law Enforcement,
Maintaining County Offices,
Duplication in staff for required positions where if counties are consolidated the total number of staff can be reduced,
Reduction in duplication and staffing for various licensing aspects (marriage, pets, hunting/fishing, etc.)
Maintenance of vital records (deeds, titles, births, deaths, etc.)
Gained efficiency in such things as tax assessments and the evaluation of property,
Improved efficiency in such aspects as zoning,
Consolidation of waste disposal, sewer, water, etc.
Basically I can see savings. Not that “worker” jobs would be eliminated on a large scale, but the reduction in redundant supervisory, management, and elected positions.
That is what has confounded attempts to consolidate in the past. All these Sheriffs and other elected bozos that don’t want to give up their fiefdoms in favor of the greater good of consolidation.
I just have to chuckle at this. Why?
County I live in just hit 21,000 population.
County to the south of me has a population of roughly 2,000
County to the east of that one has a population of 3,000
County directly south of those two has a population of 5,000.
So to get your 20k population you’d have to combine those three counties . . .
Now for the area they cover . . . same order as above starting with the county I’m in, then the other three in order. My county: 1,918 square miles. South county: 766 squre miles. One east of that: 2,486 squre miles. South of those two: 5,083 squre miles.
Consolidation here just wouldn’t work . . . . the four counties take up almost a quarter of the entire state.
Just to answer this particular question, why, at the moment.
Consolidation would occur for the EXACT same reason that smaller companies merge into larger entities.
Economies of scale
Very small counties are inefficient. They may not require all that many worker bees, but must still have the full complement of elected officials and a certain amount of bureaucracy.
Even a modest consolidation improves efficiency by introducing an economy of scale. Most likely, all the worker bees will keep their jobs. But there will be only 1 set of elected officials, instead of 3 or 4 or more, and a consolidated bureaucracy that will be considerably smaller than the multiple bureaucracies it replaces.
Ultimately, providing some modest tax relief for the people that have to support all the above.
If you want to know why, just ask the private sector. The concept can work exactly the same for counties.
Cast the ability to govern closer to the governed and it becomes incrementally harder to find enough people who don’t know you’re BS for what it and who you are.
That was part of the beauty of appointment of Senators … it’s easy to fool enough of a state full of voters to get elected but pulling the wool over the eyes of your peers who actually know you well is more difficult.