whose-government

Whose government

This is the first step of nearly every other question about a place, and the one that goes wrong silently. A parcel ID, a permit, a tax rate, and a zoning district all belong to a specific government, and answering with the wrong one produces a confident, well-sourced, wrong answer.

1. Establish the frame

Virginia's structure is the reason this needs a walk rather than a lookup.

• 95 counties and 38 independent cities. An independent city is not inside any county. Fairfax City is not in Fairfax County, Richmond City is not in Richmond County, and the two Richmonds are at opposite ends of the state.
• 189 incorporated towns, each inside a county. A town and its county both govern that ground, and they govern different things.
• Three cities gave up their charters and became towns — South Boston in 1995, Clifton Forge in 2001, Bedford in 2013. Someone asking about "Bedford City" is asking about a government that no longer exists, and the right answer names the town it became.

2. Minimum data walk

Take whichever input the caller gave and stop as soon as the government is established. This walk has no second step for most inputs.

A name. Resolve it directly. Three outcomes, and they are different:

• One match. Report it with the stack above it.
• Several matches. Stop. The result carries candidates with a distinguisher for each ("independent city, not the county"). Show them and ask. Do not pick, and do not use surrounding context to guess: the caller who says "Fairfax" may well mean the one you would not have chosen.
• A former name. "Bedford City" resolves to the town with a note saying the charter was given up and when. Pass the note on; someone using the old name is often working from an old document, and that matters to whatever they do next.

A street address. Geocode it with geocode.address, then place the resulting point. Two things to carry through:

• The postal city is not the government. Mail addressed to Alexandria is frequently in Fairfax County. Say both, and say which is which.
• The geocoder may return several candidates in different governments. When it does, that is an ambiguous address, not a ranked list. Show the candidates rather than taking the highest score.