Talk:Borough (United States)

Article move?

Should this article be moved from Boroughs of the United States to Borough (United States)? The current title, besides not conforming to the names of other articles such as County (United States), implies that the boroughs are established at the federal level, which they are not. Doctor Whom 16:38, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

In the absence of opposition in a month, I have made the move. Doctor Whom 18:28, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Belatedly, *applause* *applause*! Tomer^talk 00:31, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Alaska

I am confused about the section on Alaska. It says that Alaska has no local government below county level, yet Wasilla, Palmer, and Houston all have city level governments. I'd just fix this myself, but I figure that section is in there for a reason, so I was hoping someone could shine a light on it. --Max Talk (+) 05:33, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Methinks this was copied from another article, which probably just similarly confuses people there, too. Here's an outline, from what I can remember. I dunno if any of this is easily found via a web search or if "real research" is required.

One of the pre-statehood organic acts, I believe the one which established the Territory of Alaska (though I'm not 100% certain of that), prohibited the formation of counties in Alaska. There was never any great hue and cry on the part of Alaskans to establish a county system. The overwhelming concern during territorial days was WRT federal control. Administratively, the Secretary of the Interior could have been considered the de facto governor (and during World War II, the military exerted such control that Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr. was in fact the de facto governor for a time). Any acts of the territorial legislature were in the form of memorials to the Congress, which had final say. Cities were only allowed to incorporate following the organic act of 1900, but were denied home rule. As an intermediate step, the legislature of 1935 approved the creation of public utility districts and independent school districts. The former allowed unincorporated areas to tax for the purpose of providing limited public services. The only PUD of any significance was in Spenard, which formed in 1949, just prior to the area transitioning from mostly a farming area to a booming suburb of Anchorage. It was also in a very real (if not literal) sense, the predecessor to the Greater Anchorage Area Borough. The latter allowed incorporated and unincorporated areas to combine as a taxing district to provide schooling and to construct new schools. At least in Anchorage and Fairbanks (where I believe in both cases, the ISDs were formed in 1947), the formation of these entities allowed for substantial school construction, which became necessary on account of the post-World War II/Cold War boom in those communities. In the case of Anchorage, in the years before AISD got fully off the ground, the city was forced to set up Quonset huts along nearly an entire city block immediately south of the Delaney Park Strip to handle the overflow of students.

When Alaska held its constitutional convention in 1955 and 1956, the thought of establishing counties in Alaska was still not considered all that important. The delegates arrived at a system wherein local governments were limited to classifications of "cities" and "boroughs," and that the state would be divided into organized and unorganized boroughs. Alaska's constitutional convention was strongly influenced by New Jersey's convention of only a few years before. It's not clear whether New Jersey's actual boroughs or just the existence in that state of an entity called a "borough" influenced the decision, because Alaska's boroughs bear more of a resemblance to New York City's boroughs than to New Jersey's boroughs. The debate about boroughs was one of the more vociferous of the entire convention. One of the delegates, Frank Barr, was famously quoted as stating that he believed people would throw objects at him while walking down the street were he to vote for this.

Only following the approval of statehood were steps taken in the legislature to formalize what exactly a borough was. In the meantime, a consulting group led by a San Francisco real estate developer put together a plan in 1959 for Alaska to establish a county framework and lobbied extensively for implementation of that plan, but it was never seriously considered.

(Of course, there's a lot more to this little story, but it's become necessary for me to go do something other than sit in front of this computer all day. Hopefully, I can come back and finish this before too long.) RadioKAOS (talk) 15:52, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

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