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ional concept itself? A Department of Agriculture analyst told last week’s Rural America conference in Washington that a proliferation of regional bureaucracies represents “a threat to self government” because these regions are not subject to control by being operated by elected officials. That’s one of the same points we made when the region which encompasses Rappahannock was being organized.
Furthermore,as a Brookings Institute spokesman added at the same conference, these planning districts merely amount to a new layer of government which is supposed to do what county and local governments could not do. The problem, said the speaker, is that most of these districts are made up of the same local officials who were deemed incompetent to handle the job in the first place.
So why have them? Except as vehicles for grantsmanship and for creating new bureaucracies — and the bureaucracy has shown an alarming tendency to grow, grow, grow.
Regionalism may be some people’s theorectical pet, but from where we sit, strong local government—close to the people and directly accountable to the people—still looks like a better way of doing things.□
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