I am just going to paste here what I wrote on Slack and I as well consider removal of counties from admin_level=6 as vandalism.
Pasted text: My argument would be to not take boundary=administrative in a strict sense of government, but use it to tag all the areas that are part of the administration system. And I think that we should keep in mind a user of OSM data, who does not seek to understand all the little nuances of US government system (there are more specialized projects for that like Wikipedia), but rather looks for a simple and consistent way how to subset or graphically represent GIS data. In that sense I would find very confusing to download OSM data and find out that all states have counties at admin_level=6 , except for CT I have to look for some other obscure tag to recreate the same spacial devisions. In the end, no one cares that counties in CT seized to exist, because even state of CT itself is still actively using them for statistical and other purposes (as here). And I would think the same logic of thinking would expand to COGs or other administrative regions. >> Also, I don't believe in "states with no counties". I do believe in >> "county government dissolved". Still, the counties as boundaries >> continue to exist, and remain important, and shoudl still be >> admin_level=6. Many times interacting with the government you are >> required to list your county. And, almost everyone believes in county >> boundaries and the notion of knowing which county you are in, even if >> they don't collect taxes and have employees. > > I don't wish to insult you, but in this regard, it matters little what > you believe. As long as we agree that the constructs of human > political institutions "are what we say they are," beliefs really > don't enter the equation. There really do appear to be four states > without counties, though two (Alaska and Louisiana) have "county > equivalents." The two remaining (2.5 if we include Massachusetts' 8 > non-counties out of its 14) which really don't are Rhode Island (and > that's fairly "pure" when it comes to "no counties," they are truly > geographic in nature, not political) and Connecticut. The latter > "dissolved" its counties in 1960, "reformulated 15 RCOGs" (councils of > town governments with strictly limited function, like landuse > planning), then in 2014 reduced these to 9 RCOGs. My point is that in Massachusetts, counties are real in that the government expects you to know what county you are in, and there are signs. Many state government functions are lined up with these counties - it's just that the people are state employees instead. The federal government believes in counties - they are used to organize lots of things even if the counties have no taxing and spending. So they really are a political subdivision, even if they have zero government functions. We in the Massachusetts local community want to have admin_level 6 relations for these boundaries, and I personally consider deleting them to be vandalism.
_______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
