By Jonathan Walters

When the Berkshire County Commission convened its final official meeting a few days ago in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, it was just one more mile marker on the long, steady road leading to the disappearance of county government in New England.

The Massachusetts legislature — which was behind the shutdown — has long been gunning for counties, arguing that in a state where local government is largely defined by towns and cities, counties were a superfluous and expensive layer of bureaucracy that added little value for taxpayers. Counties, lawmakers contended, were merely a quaint vestige of colonial governance with no place in modern public-sector management and administration.

It makes sense in a visceral sort of way: In a region with a surfeit of local government — towns, townships, cities and villages — why bother with an additional — and antiquated — level of government? Connecticut, had already eliminated county government with no obvious ill effects. And so the scene in Pittsfield was just one more seemingly insignificant episode in the steady erasure of county government lines across New England.

It doesn’t take much hard thinking, however, to figure out that eliminating what amounts to the only regional governance New England knows may prove to be a large and costly mistake in the long run. In fact, in an era when issues of public policy and administration are increasingly being recognized as having regional impacts, counties are arguably the governmental structure of the future. And by caving in to those interests — towns and cities among them — who argue that counties have no value or meaning, New England is consigning itself to a huge job down the road.

That job is going to be figuring out how to pull fragmented cities and towns together into the service delivery and planning regions that taxpayers are going to be loudly demanding within a decade. As the influence of fragmented jurisdictional service delivery (a favorite New England winter scene: a town’s snowplow hanging a U-turn at its neighbor’s border) and piecemeal land use planning come to be better understood by the media and by taxpayers, New Englanders are going to devoutly wish for some layer of government that can knit their little worlds back together.

Jonathan Walters is a staff correspondent for Governing.

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