Half of Alaska Is Ungovernable

There are 3,243 counties in the United States of America, or counted differently, 3,007 counties, 82 municipalities, 64 parishes, 41 independent cities, 19 organized boroughs, 19 villages, nine islands, three main islands, three districts, and two atolls. If you’re doing the math yourself and realizing these numbers don’t add to 3,243, you’re not alone. I’m going off of Wikipedia right now, and Wikipedia is claiming that there are only 100 county equivalents in the territories, but it’s unclear which 100 of the 118 possible county equivalents it’s including in that count. Some of this confusion, to be fair, may be that eight of these county equivalents—two atolls, one municipality, four islands, and one reef—have no permanent residents. We aren’t here to talk about the United States’ attempt to govern population-less rocky outcrops in the Pacific, though. We’re here to talk about how part of Alaska is evidently ungovernable.

Counties have been around in North America for a long time, ever since the 1600’s. They were an English form of government brought over by colonists attempting to delegate some of the administration duties below the colony-wide government. Delaware has three counties. Texas has 254. New York City has five, but they call them boroughs, but they aren’t called boroughs nationally because those are reserved for a place very similar to New York City, which is Alaska.

When Alaska became a state, it had to write a constitution, and when it gathered to write its constitution, it decided it wasn’t going to have counties. This was a bold stroke. Only one other state didn’t have counties*, it was Louisiana, it had parishes which are the same thing except they were made by the Catholic Church rather than Anglo-American bureaucrats and their food is spicier. Louisiana is famously kind of not really part of America. (Does federal law apply in New Orleans? I have my doubts.) Either Alaska saw this and wanted that degree of coolness, or Alaska just thought it time to rethink a 330-year-old (in North America) system of local governance. They went with boroughs. Which, like Louisianan parishes, are basically counties.

Fine, ok, yes there are differences between boroughs and counties. I know this because Wikipedia says there are differences. But as with the uninhabited atolls in American Samoa and the sea west and south of Hawaii, we aren’t here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about the ungovernable part.

This is where Alaska really went rogue. It made its boroughs. They were basically counties. But they didn’t cover the whole state. They still don’t. Alaska left an area of 323,440 square miles out of the system. The “Unorganized Borough,” stretching from the Aleutians to roughly half the mainland to a lot of that peninsular and islandic land down around Juneau and Sitka in the southeast. Over three hundred thousand miles, ungovernable. Don’t even try, the Alaskan constitutional convention delegates said. Land war in Asia and whatnot.

To be fair, yeah, they have government up there. There’s the state, there are villages, there are school districts, there are a few cities of more than three thousand people. As with Louisiana, the extent to which federal law applies is unclear, at least to me**, but yeah, they have government. Not a lot of it, though! Less than the rest of us! And it’s a huge area. 323,440 square miles, as The Internet™ will tell you, is larger than Texas. It’s way larger than California (yeah I said it California you are a small state and the state where I live is much, much bigger and has way less biblical national disasters). It’s larger than the sixteen smallest states—Delaware, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, West Virginia, South Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and the entirety of New England—combined. And it isn’t uninhabited, either. 77,157 people, give or take a few. More people than live in sixteen of the state capitals (different sixteen). Giant area, and Alaska, or the people who were supposed to know Alaska best, looked at it and said, “No chance you’re governing that.”

Alaska’s great for a number of reasons. It’s massive, yet you can go years without thinking of it. It’s scenic, but I get the impression there are pieces of it mankind hath never seen. Bears are allowed to drive cars. Cars are allowed to drive bears, if they forgot their snow tires. There are parts of the year when the sun never goes down and parts when the sun never comes up, and when you think about it, this is rather independent of Alaska (the rest of us are way too dependent upon that incredibly luckily placed flaming ball of gas). I’m not claiming the “half our state is lawless” part of Alaska is the coolest thing about the place. I don’t know what the coolest thing about Alaska is. But I would like us all to remember this the next time we go to the DMV. It doesn’t have to be this way.

*Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts—famous bastions of limited governance [but maybe actually?]—have since deleted some of their counties’ governments, further complicating that count above, but at the time they were intact.

**I’m actually serious on this one—there are a lot of tribal governments in the Uninhabited Borough and I’m not going to figure out how that meshes with Uncle Sam right now.