Our Pockmarked Government

An article by Tony Barboza in the Los Angeles Times for March 6, 2009 ("Enclave Cherishes Its Independence," p. A12), prompts me to write about the maps of cities in our various California counties. Take a good look and you will find pockmarks all over.
The reason is that we have allowed city boundaries to develop in a way that allows areas to be excluded, in some cases surrounded, by cities. Sometimes this was because they were poor and the cities did not want responsibility for providing services to areas which did not produce tax revenue adequate to cover the cost of providing services. In other cases the residents of an area were suspicious of the intentions of a city. Developers often wanted to be outside city boundaries because they felt they had a better chance to build if they worked with county planners.
However, what has happened is that folks looking at the short-term have failed to consider what might happen in the long-term. Enclaves attract people who want no part of city policing, or who do not want to be held to neighborhood standards. I understand this attitude, and sympathize with people who feel this way, but wonder if these enclaves should then be forgotten, as most of them have been.
There was a time when an enclave might enjoy lower taxes if they stayed outside a city, but with the one percent tax limitation this argument no longer applies.
Do we really want to have these neighborhoods left out?
Do we really want to live in a place next to an enclave, with different planning, different services perhaps at a significantly lower level, and different policiing, often based on a sheriff's station miles away with the added cost of mileage and communications?
The situation is not as bad as it has been in the past. The enclaves are being annexed gradually. However, the situation ought to demand more attention than it has.