Rural Government?

The Albuquerque Tribune cover story last night was about South Valley residents considering incorporation as a solution to urban encroachment.  Good luck with that. 

The same sprawl we can imagine the city of Albuquerque feeding on like a greedy animal, happens everywhere.   Every local government eats that beast or wishes they could.   Any new municipality is going to long for that first rush of gross receipts taxes from new construction - the warm blood of the building industry.  Local governments feast as the shopping centers and  ranchitos blossom.  Only later, as those fade into suburban corpses, do they become a  burden - draining away funds for maintenance and service.  But that's a future mayorcouncillegislature's  problem.  So the solution is allowing more development to get more gross receipts taxes - a ridiculous cycle that some call  "economic development". 

Sprawl doesn't much care which jurisdiction it is in.  Making the city out to be the bad guy is an old trick that distracts us from the reality of what is being built in the county.  The differences are negligible.   The "raw" land is considered a magnificent holding zone for the urbanization machine and controlling that machine isn't even within the power of local government - but especially multiple local governments.