County and Township Government in 1946

The first postwar year found rural local government facing problems of readjustment. As the rural units had felt the impact of war less forcefully than the states and cities, so their reconstruction problems were less acute; but they were none the less genuine and significant. To mention but a few, these included the construction of deferred public-works projects, the provision of housing and various forms of assistance for returned veterans, the modernization and expansion of public-welfare services, the securing of additional revenues adequate to finance an expanded program of local activities, and the reorganization of local areas and machinery with a view to fostering economy and efficiency in a period of mounting governmental costs. Though less than a dozen state legislatures held regular sessions, the year's enactments served both to initiate reconstruction programs begun a year earlier in many states and to indicate the nature of other measures likely to be more generally adopted in the future. Statutes of previous years formed the basis of various improvements in local government which were effected in 1946. The school-consolidation programs begun in the preceding year in Illinois and Kansas continued to make progress. At the beginning of October, 174 consolidations involving 897 districts had been effected in Illinois. In Kansas, some 2,000 districts have already been eliminated, and it has been estimated that the program in that state, as revised early in 1947, may ultimately reduce the number of districts, originally well over 8,000, to only 3,000.