Reform
A government proposal in 2004 called for the counties to be replaced by five large regions with health care as their sole responsibilities; two regions in Jutland, two regions in Zealand and one region covering Funen and the southernmost part of Jutland. The proposal also required the municipalities to merge reducing them from 271 to about 100, with a minimum of 20,000 inhabitants in each municipality, although some exceptions were made to this rule. From 2007 25 municipalities have fewer than 30,000 inhabitants each, with the average number of inhabitants being over 55,500 per municipality. Only the United Kingdom and Ireland have more populous entities at the lowest political administrative level.
The reform was confirmed by the Danish Parliament on February 24, 2005, and the counties were abolished on January 1, 2007.
Read more about this topic: Counties Of Denmark
Famous quotes containing the word reform:
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“He reckoned a body could reform the old man with a shot-gun, maybe, but he didn’t know no other way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“... most reform movements in our country have been cursed by a lunatic fringe and have mingled sound ideas for social progress with utopian nonsense.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)