Louisville, you’ve made a mistake

Fox News reports that Louisville and Jefferson County are consolidating.
In Indianapolis we consolidated city and county government back in 1970. It sucks.
Services we used to take for granted out in the county are only beginning to reappear. Snow removal in the “county” used to be a joke, for instance, while “city” streets were clear and dry. The police and fire departments weren’t consolidated; the schools weren’t consolidated; and there are still four honest-to-God independent cities within the current Indianapolis city limits: Lawrence, Speedway, Beech Grove, and Southport.
And it was done for one reason and one reason only: To counter flagging Republican-voting populations in the inner city as all the whites fled the ‘hood (after consolidation county residents could vote for mayor and city-county council). That strategy worked for thirty years and is now on its last legs; we’ve got a Democrat mayor (with whom my wife went to high school, incidentally) and a one-vote Republican majority on the City-County Council. And all the Republicans have moved out of Marion County into the nine surrounding counties to continue their white flight.
I wish Louisvillians well (they do put on a kick-ass fireworks display every year at Thunder Over Louisville) but I suspect they’ve just done more to hurt themselves than they have to help themselves.