Local Government
In Colonial times, and even in the first 150 years of the United States, much like Virginia as a whole, South Hampton Roads was in an almost constant state of change in terms of local government, largely due to growth, as counties were divided and towns were formed as the population grew. Some towns grew to become cities. Under the state constitutional changes in 1871, extant and future cities in Virginia became independent cities of the counties they had formerly been located within.
However, in the second half of the 20th century, an unprecedented wave of city-county-town local government consolidations took place in South Hampton Roads and on the Virginia Peninsula. Nowhere else in Virginia have rural areas and more dense cities been combined in such a manner as these two areas. The changes resulted in the area having Virginia's cities with the largest land areas and the most farming, even over 30 years after the consolidations in some instances.
Read more about this topic: South Hampton Roads
Famous quotes containing the words local and/or government:
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—Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 5, Yale University Press (1961)
“The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life—this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)