Jim Choate wrote:
I'd be surprised if many (any?) states have any sort of program to get people to perferentialy live in certain counties. I suspect the other counties might get upset.
I suspect Florida is quite similar.
But maybe to redraw the boundaries. That's a common problem in Britain. Every now and again some government (almost always Conservative, for reasons to do with gerrymandering I suspect) gets it into its head that it would be a Good Thing if counties were more or less the same size so tried to amalgamate smaller ones and split larger ones and "rationalize" boundaries. Also, I know that smaller cities in the USA often split themselves away from larger ones and I don't know that counties don't. I've been to Bellaire, Texas... There were bad cases of redrawing boundaries in the UK in the 1960s, 70s & 80s. Lancashire, which once upon a time had a population about the size of Denmark or Belgium lost Liverpool and Manchester and large chunks of the north-west coast. Totally new counties which no-one had ever heard of before, such as Cleveland and Humberside were invented. "County Boroughs" (i.e. a town or city which was its own county) were forcibly amalgamated into the counties surrounding them. My own home town, Brighton was forced to merge with East Sussex by the Conservatives. At about the same time we lost our police force to the Sussex police (for some reason the only thing the newspapers complained about with losing the white helmets they used to wear - all the other forces used blue or black) and our water supply (to enforced privatisation). Most (but not all) of this sort of thing has been changed back by the Labour government which is very slightly less centralizing than the Tories were Ken