Special Districts

Special Districts (With John Oliver)

Special Districts in the US are governmental units held to provide special services to the people living within the borders of the districts. The first S.D (Special District) was built in California in 1887 and it was an irrigation district. In the second part of the 20th Century, Special Districts proliferated a lot, we can find more than 40.000 of them now and you can live on many S.D in one time.

S.D are special taxing district as they are allowed to co tax to fulfill a special purpose. They have collected more than one 100 B$ which is more than Russia military spending by 16 B$.
There are different type of S.D: Irrigation District , Fire District, Mosquito District, Lighting District..
See more on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_district
John Oliver was joking about the Mayor of West Suburban Evergreen who was recovering from a mosquito bite while he was living in the middle of four S.D dedicated to Mosquito.

S.D is a form of ghost government because it lack a lot of transparency, few people are hearing about them, and fewer are running them. John Oliver gave the example of Mosquito Control S.D run by 2 men that did all the formalities in a scrupulous way and published in a 43min video on youtube that was literally watched by no-one. Another example is Conroe in Texas where a company hoped to create a special district to issue on undeveloped land but as there was nobody living there, they brought a couple that will live there for 9 months and vote for 500 M$ worth of bond for their housing project.  So basically, they will vote for a 500 M$ project and leave the place..

The participation rate for special district election is as low as 1.8% as election are held every 10.9 business day on average with no one taking place on Election Day
See what is Election Day on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Day_(United_States)
So, the number of S.D is growing steadily and many of old S.D continue to exits only because when they were created, no dissolving process was made.