Attempt for Birmingham to annex all of Jefferson County

The city of Birmingham is a sinking ship. The suburbs there are fine

I think 50 years later that 65% polling would come waaaay down from the OTM residents.

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The unadvertised push was to help prevent the Birmingham government from being controlled by black residents, ...

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strangely enough the city we lived in did just the opposite back in the early 90's. with predictable results population peaked in 1990. 23% decrease since then.

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Worked well for Baton Rouge

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Do we know yet?

I don't know. I don't really have an argument for or against it. It works for us in Nashville. The richer satellite cities got to keep some independence as far as police and zoning are concerned, and the outlying portions of the county pay less in taxes because they have less services. It' fine, I guess. It's been that way for 60 something years.

I think it would be a tall task to consolidate places nowadays. Louisville did it in 2003. Don't we have some posters from there? How's that working out?

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Do we know yet?

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I think that is why everyone fractured off. They just created a mayor-president to treat the whole parish more like a city.

It is a terrible idea.

Smaller government is better in almost every single case.

1970 is so long ago and irrelevant to today that it might as well be BC.

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I think it would be a tall task to consolidate places nowadays. Louisville did it in 2003. Don't we have some posters from there? How's that working out?

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Poorly, but Jefferson County's (Kentucky) problems really originated when they merged the city and county public school systems in 1975. That pulverized what was a really good county public system.

What happened in Louisville is that because of a large existing Catholic population (one of the top 5 or 10 %-wise in the country IIRC) and widespread Catholic school system, what were otherwise good, traditional single sex Catholic schools but nothing remarkable became academic and athletic powerhouses (you know them if you know Louisville - St. Xavier, Trinity, and DeSales on the boys side and Sacred Heart, Assumption, Mercy, and Presentation on the girls side) as families wholesale took their kids out of the public school system and into the Catholic one, many non-Catholics included. It's effectively a parallel school system with 10 Catholic high schools (many of them big) and, until a recent consolidation, something like 35 - 40 Catholic elementary schools. A metro area of Louisville's size has no reason to have so many large private schools. The one thing it has done is kept property prices down relatively to peer cities, as huge chunks of middle and upper middle class people don't utilize the public school system and are forking over $15,000 - 30,000 or more a year in private (typically Catholic) schools a year that would otherwise be going indirectly into a mortgage or directly into property taxes.

Jefferson County Alabama would never go for it because the towns with independent school districts and police departments won't move an inch on any of it. Funnily enough, Birmingham has a bit of the opposite problem; the few private schools in the Birmingham area are either tiny and ultra-expensive or service a relatively niche Catholic population (John Carroll, which isn't that big). The property prices in the OTM towns are outrageously high relative to what they are for similar homes in similar areas compared to peer cities - like, not far off from Nashville high in Mountain Brook, Homewood, Vestavia, et al.

Depends on the area. Washington Parish has 40,000 people and a sheriffs office, Bogalusa and Franklinton have a police and fire dept, and the parish has multiple volunteer departments. I'm of the opinion that the Sheriff should handle all policing, while the emergency preparedness team manages fire services. Get rid of all the admin that comes along with multiple departments and use that money to provide a better service. I'm kinda tired of all these little kingdoms these people set up.

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I think that is why everyone fractured off. They just created a mayor-president to treat the whole parish more like a city. It is a terrible idea. Smaller government is better in almost every single case.

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Except for the most important service that local government provides, infrastructure.

If Central is on it's own do we get the Central throughway?

If St George is on its own do we get the new Pecue interchange that just opened up this year?

We can't get a loop because the parish leaders of the metro area refuse to cooperate. Once the city-parish gov't goes away does parish wide infrastructure projects go way with it?