I am concerned about losing…

I am concerned about losing local decision-making and I support keeping conservation decisions rooted in our community. Other mergers, such as municipal amalgamation in the early 2000s were a net negative for the voice of citizens. One example of this is access to library services: While one library card provides access to a much larger collection (good), libraries became more generic and less responsive to the people using them (bad). Classic quantity over quality. As a result of the greater distance between users and decision makers, collection and program development as well as larger decisions like building new branches are driven more by the concerns of bureaucrats and politicians than by those of their local constituents. It’s a much less direct customer service relationship. In short, government bureaucrats and politicians benefit from standardization and amalgamation; the rest of us do not.