[South Florida DX Association] Alaskan counties

[Bill]

This interesting note from another list describes Counties In Alaska and 
how it affects in particular, the DXBase logging program.
Bill Marx W2CQ


Point of order and a bit of history.  There are no counties in Alaska.
Instead we have boroughs, which are the functional equivalent of counties.
My understanding is that this came about prior to Alaska statehood in 1959.
The big three industries up here then were fishing, mining, and logging.
Oil wasn't on anyone's radar yet.

These three industries lobbied Congress to preclude the new state of Alaska
from organizing into counties, so as to prevent the imposition of local
property taxes on their operations.  Congress agreed and the law creating
the State of Alaska forbade the forming of counties.  So the new State of
Alaska Legislature created a State Constitution that, instead of counties,
authorized the creation of Boroughs, which do have the power to levy
property taxes!

There are now 18 boroughs in Alaska, mostly in the more populated areas of
the state.  However, despite what the Census map indicates, the borough
system does not cover the entire state.  Most of the bush communities are
unincorporated and wish to stay that way.  They are cash poor and live
largely on subsistence - hunting, fishing, trapping and government handouts,
state and federal.  They do not wish to have an organized borough government
that would inevitably lead to property taxes to support the local government
and schools and drain their meager cash resources via taxation.

So this leaves Alaska with vast areas that are not organized in any form of
local government.  I believe the solution used by the County Hunters is to
use the four Judicial Districts of the State of Alaska Court System instead.
The Judicial Districts do cover the entire state, even out to the end of the
Aleutians.

The "County" names you see in DXBase are neither counties, nor boroughs, nor
Judicial Districts.  Rather they are regional names descriptive of various
geographic parts of the state.  For example, I live in the Matanuska-Susitna
Borough which is in the Third Judicial District and the South-Central
Region.  Which one would you prefer to use?  Maybe someone could check with
the County Hunters to verify the Judicial District use.  If that is actually
the case maybe Neal can change the current regional names to First, Second,
Third and Fourth JD or something like that for AK counties.

73,
Gary AL9A