Metro Pulse/Editor's Corner/Quick County Quiz

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So why do we need 95, anyway?

by Bill Carey

It started innocently enough. Last year, on a drive across the state, my 10-year-old stepdaughter was bored. I suggested she get the Tennessee road map out of the glove compartment and quiz me. The way the game worked, she named a county, and I tried to name the county seat.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. But after a year of doing it over and over again, I can tell you that it's a lot harder than it sounds. Sure, you might know Knox, Blount, and Shelby. But how many people know that Lewisburg is the Marshall County seat and that Ripley is the Lauderdale County seat? In fact, there are a lot of things that make Tennessee's system of counties and county seats maddening. There's the fact that many words (Henderson, Jackson, and Benton, only to name some) are counties in one part of the state and county seats in another. There's the fact that Decaturville and Decatur are county seats in different parts of the state, and that Union County and Unionville and Madison County and Madisonville are on opposite sides of the state. There's the fact that many Tennessee cities are the largest city in the county, but not the county seat (neither Oak Ridge, Johnson City, nor Bristol are county seats).

But the most intimidating thing is that there are 95 counties. Some of them are so small that it's hard to imagine why someone ever drew a boundary and called it a county in the first place. In fact, 34 of Tennessee's counties have less than 20,000 residents. Ten have less than 10,000 residents.

Keep in mind that every county, no matter how small, comes with a certain amount of infrastructure supported by a combination of property taxes, state-shared sales taxes, and state-shared gas taxes. Each county has an executive, a legislative body, a sheriff, a clerk, a tax assessor, a general sessions judge, and a register of deeds. Most importantly, each has a school system, a school board, and a superintendent.

This summer, during one of the agonizing sessions in which my stepdaughter was giggling at my inability to remember that Jacksboro is the Campbell County seat, I had a flashback from a conversation I had last year with a member of the state House. "The problem's not with the state government," my friend, a member of House leadership, told me. "It's with all these county governments. My God, if we redrew the county lines so that we weren't having to support 95 county governments and all those school systems, we could save hundreds of millions."

I've done a lot of thinking about this suggestion, and it makes a lot of sense. Most of Tennessee's counties were organized in the early- to mid-19th century, when many Tennessee residents were still "taming" the frontier. The borders that exist today were drawn with the idea that you could travel on a horse from the most remote farm to the courthouse and back in one day. They were drawn before cars, paved roads, man-made lakes, telephones, fax machines, and email.

A few days ago, I drew up new counties. I started by carving out seven urban or semi-urban ones, centered on Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, the tri-cities, Clarksville, and Jackson. Then I created eight mostly rural counties in various corners of the state, most of which were comprised of six or seven current counties. I thought for a few minutes about just how much money it would save to consolidate all those county governments, all those sheriffs' offices, and all those school systems. I thought about how helpful it would be to have new larger counties centered on Tennessee's big cities when it comes to city planning and mass transit.

But then I thought about how much all those sheriffs, road supervisors, and county executives would fight such reform. After all, Tennessee's current system of 95 counties may not be a model of efficiency, but it gives a few established politicians and country lawyers a way to have power, to have a say in their little corner of the state. They would not give that up without a fight.

Of course, there's another reason why I'm sort of glad that Tennessee will never reform its anachronistic system of county governments. For the time being, thanks to my stepdaughter, I can name all 95 counties and all 95 county seats. If anyone ever comes up with a statewide version of Jeopardy!, I'd be dangerous.