Reform
A government proposal in 2004 called for the counties to be replaced by five large regions with health care as their sole responsibilities; two regions in Jutland, two regions in Zealand and one region covering Funen and the southernmost part of Jutland. The proposal also required the municipalities to merge reducing them from 271 to about 100, with a minimum of 20,000 inhabitants in each municipality, although some exceptions were made to this rule. From 2007 25 municipalities have fewer than 30,000 inhabitants each, with the average number of inhabitants being over 55,500 per municipality. Only the United Kingdom and Ireland have more populous entities at the lowest political administrative level.
The reform was confirmed by the Danish Parliament on February 24, 2005, and the counties were abolished on January 1, 2007.
Read more about this topic: Counties Of Denmark
Famous quotes containing the word reform:
“Undoubtedly if we were to reform this outward life truly and thoroughly, we should find no duty of the inner omitted. It would be employment for our whole nature.... But a moral reform must take place first, and then the necessity of the other will be superseded, and we shall sail and plow by its force alone.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Both of us felt more anxiety about the South—about the colored people especially—than about anything else sinister in the result. My hope of a sound currency will somehow be realized; civil service reform will be delayed; but the great injury is in the South. There the Amendments will be nullified, disorder will continue, prosperity to both whites and colored people will be pushed off for years.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)