Friday, February 17, 2006

County splitting on the Mainland

I have no idea if you knew me then, or the incident.
We almost split the County....
We owned the local Intermountain News in Burney, California.

Our rugged hilly portion of the county was ignored by the government... that is, until we started running little notes regarding the possibility of splitting off from the county.
Though, rural in nature, we had the huge tax bases from the major ranches in the area, including one owned by Hearst.

Well, we got our roads paved, we got more permanent staffing for our small Sheriff's sub-station, our schools got more upkeep and general funding and we got a representative to come to our area meetings..
The benefits were certainly worth the effort.

The bottom line is, that when we took a straw vote, via the newspapers ballots, we almost had the votes to split the county. We were most surprised at the number of people that lived in Redding that voted for/with us.

Another effort to split the county came to Santa Barbara, California. The North Count was ignored until the people figured out that they also had the major tax base.

With this information, the people of Santa Maria, Orcutt and Guadalupe and surrounding municipalities got a Very nice government complex, county council meetings are held there every other scheduled meeting and an entire litany of benefits, that before the 'Split the county effort' , only Santa Barbara people received.

In my estimation, both those areas will eventually be split as it will be here on the Big Island, the demographics will be the main issue.

The one thing the Californians have, is honest councilmen with plenty of Sunshine and oversight.

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