Thanks for the detailed explanation. I suspect that about all the
county ID does here is to give the patrolling officers a quick
indication that the car is an "outsider", and perhaps bears watching.
Or, maybe I'm just naturally suspicious. Cars, but not trucks, must be
registered in the owner's county of residence.
There are also fiefdoms. When I came to Tennessee after being stationed
at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, a bank in Dayton still held a lien on
my car. Tennessee law required me to register the car in Tennessee
within a specified period of time. The local county clerk would not sell
me a license plate because of the lien. I drove fifteen miles to
Lynchburg, the county seat of Moore County, home to the Jack Daniels
distillery, and interrupted the checker game at the courthouse to get
their clerk to sell me a plate.
Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA
On 1/22/2017 12:46 AM, Moose wrote:
On 1/20/2017 3:09 PM, Jim Nichols wrote:
Glad to hear that Calif. is frugal, as well. The plastic stickers
discolor fairly quickly. Perhaps Calif. doesn't worry about county
ID strips.
The importance of counties, politically, administratively and
culturally, varies a great deal across the US. We had a tour of the
offices of Portland Co, ME. with a friend who was a county
commissioner. I was amazed at how inconsequential counties are there.
They have courts and a jail and do other minor administrative things.
Virtually all sub-state government power is in townships. Unlike the
West, virtually all land is in townships that are geographically much
larger than the towns in them. If a township doesn't like the county
it is in, a referendum can move it to another one.
In Calif, counties are important, and some are huge, and/or have huge
populations. They run courts, collect taxes and apportion those due
back to cities and provide all services for the large areas outside
the incorporated cities within them. I think that's a lot like the
Midwest and South. But very few have any social/cultural significance.
People speak of Napa Valley, not the County. Lake County is about the
only one that comes to mind as a reference. There are some sub county
differentiation; West Marin is a part of Marin County that is
culturally and politically quite different than the rest, for example.
Jut a couple of miles from us, you drive from Alameda County into
Contra Costa County, but there's no sense of change or difference, nor
have I known anyone who seems to think there's any difference of note.
There are other administrative oddities about, as well. When you cross
that line out of the City of Berkeley, you enter an unincorporated
part of CC County, but everyone calls it Kensington, and it doesn't
rely on most county services. It has (is?) what it calls a Service
District, that has police and fire departments, maintains roads, etc.
All it uses the County for is courts and county jail.
Putting the county name on license plates here just wouldn't mean
anything to most folks.
Differentiated Moose
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