Middlesex County, Massachusetts is huge. According to Wikipedia, it has a population of more than 1.6 million people, with 818 square miles of land area. As a governmental entity, Middlesex has been neutered, electing only a small core of officers (district attorney, sheriff, registrars of deeds and probate) to perform functions that are vestigial offices of county government.
Yet, our county retains its geographic identity alongside 3,143 counties and county-equivalents across the United States. Steve Kornacki, a native of Middlesex County, is fond of ignoring it while devoting fond attention to counties with 1% of the population of the county of his youth. The vast size of Middlesex has rendered it useless as a descriptor of much of anything. Extending from Ashby to Holliston, to North Reading, to Cambridge, there’s a whole lot of a whole lot of things happening that defies a meaningful summary.
Those little counties adored by Steve Kornacki are all centered around a county courthouse, and have become units of analysis on all kids of measures. Middlesex has a population greater than 12 states, including four New England states (ME, NH, VT, RI), and like a state it has a dozen district courthouses and corresponding judicial districts; seven of these districts have a population greater than the average US county (104,435).
Eastern Equine Encephalitis in Middlesex County? That’s not very specific. Eastern Equine Encephalitis in the Third Judicial District of Eastern Middlesex County? For the 172,000 residents of the district that includes Arlington, Belmont, and Cambridge, that’s a defining and meaningful geographic region.
The 12 “counties” of Middlesex.
If you combine the Boston municipal courts into one unit, there are 63 judicial districts in the Commonwealth. the population of the average Massachusetts judicial district (103,930) is slightly smaller than the national average for counties. These 63 districts, if we declared them to be the equivalent of counties, would make our data comparable to the rest of the nation.
This is really a simple fix, a quick and easy way to create more meaningful statistical entities that aligns to national definitions of existing for “administrative or statistical purposes.” Clearly, the judicial districts serve an administrative purpose, and would provide a more specific and granular unit for statistical purposes, so why not just designate them as counties?
If we call the judicial districts counties, what do we do with the existing counties? We find a new name for them, possibly regions. Where county commissions currently exist, they can become regional commissions. Sheriffs, district attorneys, registrars of probate and deeds could serve regions.
Changing counties to regions and judicial districts to counties is a semantic game. Though it would require more complex legal language to enact it, it requires nothing more than clerical accuracy by the folks combing through the law to identify instances in the text and make adjustments to the language therein. There may be some requirements to describe regions, formerly known as counties, when pointing toward the few constitutional provisions related to counties. Again, this is not a functional change, but it does revolve around items such as the drawing of legislative districts to correspond (as much as possible) within county borders.
That said, the real fun in this proposal would be to name the new counties. Counties could be named for famous folks or prominent geographic features attached to the county, with a preference for names not used for an existing county or municipality. For example, O’Neill county could be named for Tip O’Neill, and the county containing the city of Barnstable (and Hyannis Port) could be Kennedy County.
Here’s a map of the 63 “counties” and their population (2010 census). I think you will agree using these existing districts, served by their very own courthouse, make much more sense for statistical analysis and making decisions based on criteria (such as rates of COVID-19 infection per 100,000 residents).
This is an interactive map, available by following this link.
I chalk this problem up to the revolt against landed aristocracy in 1776. How can you have a county without a count?
Although with 63 new counties, you are talking more than a hundred new registrars of probate and of deeds.
These lifetime sinecures are practically hereditary. Let the patronage games begin!
PS More seriously, let’s get rid of elected sheriffs.
That’s not the intent. We retain the same offices that are now at a county level, and we rename them as regional officers. We are just changing names, so current counties are named regions, and current judicial districts are named counties.
I’ve never figured out the reason for electing civil servants and bureaucrats, but the reason we keep doing so even in non-counties is that their jobs are in the Constitution and we’ve never bothered to amend it in this regard.
In most states elections are conducted at the county level, which is why Steve Kornacki uses them as a point of reference. I suppose even in MA you could study voting patterns by county.
Sorry, I meant to hit the reply button and got the (-) instead.
We report election data by town, and if the unit of government responsible for elections was the criteria for analysis, they wouldn’t go through the trouble of aggregating it by county.
That said, elections are the easiest example of large counties reducing the ability to analyze data. The more serious example is when the feds start setting standards by COVID infection by county. There’s far too much room for variance between Hopkinton to Lowell, from Ayer to Cambridge. Middlesex County, as a unit of analysis, makes no sense unless you are comparing it to Rhode Island or New Hampshire.
Don’t forget that in many states counties are the smallest units of government. You vote at a precinct within your county rather than within your town or city.
You can cancel the – by clicking on the +.
I hit the (+) and life is good.
One of the things I like about Massachusetts is how easy it is to get precinct level election data from the Secretary of State’s website. In contrast, try getting results broken down by the ten towns or 1,052 election districts in Suffolk County, New York.
https://apps2.suffolkcountyny.gov/boe/eleres/20ge/default.htm
Contrary to what sometimes seems to be popular belief Bill Galvin is good at what he does.
I note that the Census Bureau and CDC track and report data at the county level. County boundaries change less frequently than CD boundaries (which tend to change every ten years). I suspect the same is true for economic and demographic data.
I think it’s worth at least considering how this proposal would affect long-term data tracking, especially disease and similar epidemiological data. At the moment, it is difficult to obtain COVID data at a grain size smaller than “county” nationwide.
An aspect of this diary that I enthusiastically agree with is its reminder that our intuition about a great many things is wildly incorrect when it comes to geography. In particular, the extreme concentration of people in cities and towns is difficult to internalize. The impact of that extreme concentration is even more difficult to convey.
So difficult that our media nearly always gets it wrong. Steve Kornacki. so far as I can tell, is generally one of the more reliable voices. Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, as well as ALL the non-medical voices on CNN, have been wrong far more frequently than they’re right in their reporting of the COVID pandemic.
The risk of COVID infection for an individual in Ashby is vastly lower than an individual in Lowell. That difference is crucial for effective management of a pandemic like this one and is completely obscured by tracking data at the county level. According to 2010 census data, Ashby at 3,085 people is about 0.2% of the 1.5M people who lived in Middlesex County. Lowell at 106,529 is about 7% of the county total. Similarly, Ashby is about 2.85% of the total land area of Middlesex County while Lowell is just 1.78%.
Consider Clark County, NV — the county that contains Las Vegas. The population concentration in Clark County is even more extreme than Middlesex County. Indian Springs NV, at 910 people, is 0.04% of the county total while Las Vegas, at 583,756, is 29.89%. So nearly a third of Clark County’s population lives in Las Vegas! By land area, Indian Springs is 0.23% of Clark County while Las Vegas is 1.8%.
Consider the 7-day rolling average daily infection rate for Middlesex and Clark counties on 15-Dec-2020 — chosen because that was the highest rate recorded for Clark County to date. That rate was 1,930 cases for Clark County, compared with 999 cases for Middlesex County.
How do you think the risk for a resident of Indian Springs NV compared to the risk of a resident of Ashby MA? The population-adjusted rate of the two counties is 66.28 cases per100KPop in Middlesex vs 99.82 cases per100KPop in Clark.
So it appears that the Clark County is about 50% riskier than Middlesex County, based on the risk per capita.
In the absence of detail data, how shall the county-level figures be used to provide town-level estimates? If we stick with population, then Ashby should contribute about 0.2% of the total — about 0.14 cases per 100K on the day in question. Lowell has an expected rate of about 4.68 cases per 100K on that day.
Meanwhile, Indian Spring NV has an expected daily rate of 0.05 cases per 100K, while Las Vegas has a rate of 29.54 cases per 100K.
If population is used to allocate risk, and if risk is measured by the number of cases per 100K population, then the results go as follows:
Las Vegas, MA: 28.54
Lowell, MA: 4.68
Ashby, MA: 0.14
Indian Spring, NV: 0.05
This in the context of the following county-level data:
Clark County, NV: 98.82
Middlesex County, MA: 66.28
The political resistance to significant restrictions on lifestyle — schools, churches, restaurants, and bars closed, mandatory masks, etc — is not surprising given the enormously low risk in small towns like Ashby MA and Indian Spring NV.
America is HUGE, and there are MANY MANY more towns like Ashby and Indian Spring than Lowell or Las Vegas. At least some aspects of the resistance to extreme COVID measures is the direct result of:
It is hard to imagine a worse response to COVID than what we’ve already lived through. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that the new administration will bring with it a bright new day.
Only one of the above four bullets is the sole fault of the GOP and Donald Trump. We must address the remaining three in order to finish the recovery that has hopefully begun with the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
I actually really like this idea, but want to give it more teeth. Each county sends a state senator to a unicameral statehouse and you can solve a lot of the redundancy on Beacon Hill. I’d also be fine with 63 county prosecutors and sheriffs, makes them far more accountable than the current setup and would disperse our prison population and keep it small. Add 63 county level school districts with a vocational high school each and you’d equalize a lot of the funding discrepancies and opportunity costs of geography.
You’re going to run into SCOTUS-mandated equal representation issues with your first idea. Personally I think it’s fine to have one chamber apportioned by population and another by jurisdiction. The Constitution only requires that every state have a republican government, but the Court has interpreted the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to mandate one-person-one-vote representation. The US Senate gets away with equality among the states since that setup is expressly in the Constitution, but states do not get to do likewise. If both chambers are required to be apportioned by population it does seem to be a bit redundant. IMO the whole point of two chambers is to have two models of representation designed to produce concurrent majorities.