KCRag Forum

With the recent St. Louis campaign to merge with the county, I was wondering if there were movements to merge the low population counties of Missouri and Kansas. Quite a few in Kansas are less than 2000 and losing population fast, it seems I feasible for them to pay for the amount of bureaucracy needed of a county. Is there any discussion surrounding this or is it unlikely due to local politics?

One merger that would make sense locally is Edgerton merging with Gardner. Edgerton is 1600 and has a lot of warehouses but it's not really growing population wise. Gardner is growing and could use the warehouses

Riverite wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 4:45 pm With the recent St. Louis campaign to merge with the county, I was wondering if there were movements to merge the low population counties of Missouri and Kansas. Quite a few in Kansas are less than 2000 and losing population fast, it seems I feasible for them to pay for the amount of bureaucracy needed of a county. Is there any discussion surrounding this or is it unlikely due to local politics?

It’s not the County government size that’s where the bloat is at. Look at the sum total of services needed to support a community.

There’s 321 school districts. That’s one district per ~9000 people.
~23 are in the top four counties

236.5k or so students are in the remaining 298. For 885 students per district on average. If my numbers are 100,000 low the numbers still don’t look good at 1125 per district. That’s 13 grades of kids, The high number would be an average grade size of 90. Imagine what the low end looks like.

That’s hundreds of duplicated school district jobs. They all have a school board.

https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2016/feb/ ... s-opposit/

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Move onto fire protection districts, water service districts, sewer districts, road districts.

Imagine how many jobs are tied up outside of county government there too.

In a county of 1200 where 60% are working age, it doesn’t take long before consolidation ruins towns through the knock on effect.

It’s not the amount of bad bureaucracy to focus on, it’s to ask if the places exist because of it.

Kansas just did a round of school consolidation like a decade ago.

longviewmo wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 7:41 am Kansas just did a round of school consolidation like a decade ago.

They wanted to go further and have one per county below a certain point. There's still an excess of probably 100 school districts.

I'd like to see Platte, Clay, Jackson and Cass merged into one entity and one school district/library district. So it would be like NYC broken up into boroughs or maybe like London with the Greater London government.

I would break it up into 6 sub cities (Platte, Clay, Cass, Urban Core (KC), Ind./Raytown, Lees Summit)

London would be a bad example as the GLA has very little real authority and most power goes to the boroughs and city which can impede progress and further fragmentation

dnweava wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 8:28 am I'd like to see Platte, Clay, Jackson and Cass merged into one entity and one school district/library district. So it would be like NYC broken up into boroughs or maybe like London with the Greater London government.

I would break it up into 6 sub cities (Platte, Clay, Cass, Urban Core (KC), Ind./Raytown, Lees Summit)

one library district? Have you not heard of the Mid Continent System? It's nearly the scale you mention.

Here’s a good piece on EMS services.

https://youtu.be/Ezv8sdTLxKo
Start just before 8:37 when in gets into rural service and watch for a minute (or watch it all if you like)

After watching it consider the impact when rural community has 125% as many people age 65+ as urban areas.
I saw something that in some areas if you don’t prepay for helicopter service you don’t have service at all or it’s like another hospital bill worth of cost

It’s just another stressor on rural areas and will force more and more people to move away.


So these articles come as no surprise. Access to healthcare is mentioned as a risk.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/20 ... -covid-19/