Where is the politics?

It is all very well to talk about ‘partnership working’ — but what we really need is participatory democracy and real politics! What happened to political campaigning: canvassing on the doorsteps? What is wrong with debates in the council chambers, that we need to introduce this extra layer of ‘partnerships’?

If you live in Oxfordshire, contact the Oxfordshire Partnership and go to the next meeting.

Personally, I think the police and health functions should be merged into the county, to make them more democratically accountable. When the counties are abolished, the regions should take over, as the confederations of local authorities envisioned in the Green manifesto. By then, the regional boundaries will have to be adjusted: Oxfordshire has little in common with Kent beyond that each of them is an hour’s train ride from London. There should be at least three regions in the “little crown” around London, rather than just two (South East England and East Anglia = East of England). But this is already too much detail for you western-Atlantics!

In California the default local government is the county. Everyone in California is in one county or another, but communities can also incorporate into cities, which can then set their own local laws and gain a considerable amount of local control over land use and such. The cities then, in turn, form associations of governments (such as SANDAG) that govern regional transportation and housing needs. School districts and special districts (like for water, parks, even pest abatement) form yet another level of local government. You’ve always got a county government, and everything else is optional.

I’ve heard no clamoring for the abolition (or addition of) any layers of local government in California. Essentially the county serves as your default until a community feels like it could do a better job running things locally. Probably the biggest structural issue with local government is that county supervisors are elected by the entire county electorate (five districts per county, except in San Francisco) but have different levels of authority depending on whether you’re in an incorporated city or not. For example, East Los Angeles is an unincorporated community, but all of their local government comes from the County. Their supervisor (Gloria Molina) is elected not just by the people of East L.A. and other unincorporated areas, but also by the residents of many neighborhing incorporated cities like Commerce, Montebello, Bell Gardens, El Monte, etc.

In the United States, Hawai’i and Alaska both have only a single level of local government. Hawai’i has counties and Alaska has boroughs.