During the 1950s, when the push for the
territory of Alaska to become a state was at its height, any municipal government was extremely limited and scattered. Territory-wide, there were no more than a few dozen
incorporated cities, and a small handful of service districts, broken into
public utility districts and
independent school districts. The service districts were authorized by the territorial legislature in 1935 to allow unincorporated areas limited powers to provide services and to raise taxes for them. The
United States Congress had forbidden the territory from establishing counties in keeping with the wishes of large fishing and mining companies, which wanted powers over natural resources, land and money to remain with the federal government. The delegates to the
convention which wrote the
Alaska Constitution had, in fact, debated the merits of establishing
counties, and had rejected the idea in favor of creating a system of boroughs, both organized and unorganized. The intent of the framers of the constitution was to provide for maximum local
self-government with a minimum of
local government units and tax-levying jurisdictions. The minutes of the constitutional convention indicate that counties were not used as a form of local government for various reasons. The failure of some local economies to generate enough revenue to support separate counties was an important issue, as was the desire to use a model that would reflect the unique character of Alaska, provide for maximum local input, and avoid a body of county
case law already in existence. Instead, Alaska adopted boroughs as a form of regional government. This regionalization tried to avoid having a number of independent, limited-purpose governments with confusing boundaries and inefficient governmental operations, as the territorial service districts had been. The boroughs were widely seen as an important foundation for the government to provide services without becoming all-powerful and unnecessarily intrusive, an argument which surfaced time and time again during various attempts by the legislature to create organized boroughs out of portions of the unorganized borough. Alaska adopted the borough structure by statute in 1961, and envisioned boroughs to serve as an "all-purpose" form of local government, to avoid the perceived problems of county government in the
lower 48 states as well as
Hawaii. According to Article X of the Alaska Constitution, areas of the state unable to support borough government were to be served by several unorganized boroughs, which were to be mechanisms for the state to regionalize services; however, separate unorganized boroughs were never created. The entire state was defined as one vast unorganized borough by the Borough Act of 1961, and over the ensuing years, Alaska's organized boroughs were carved out of it. Alaska's first organized borough, and the only one incorporated immediately after passage of the 1961 legislation, was the
Bristol Bay Borough. The pressure from residents of other areas of the state to form boroughs led to the Mandatory Borough Act of 1963, which called for all election districts in the state over a certain minimum population to incorporate as boroughs by January 1, 1964. A resolution of the State of Alaska's Local Boundary Commission introduced in January 2009 spells this out in greater detail: •
WHEREAS, the 1963 Alaska State Legislature passed, and Governor Egan signed into law, the "Mandatory Borough Act" (Chapter 52, SLA 1963), dictating that certain regions of Alaskathose encompassing Ketchikan, Juneau, Sitka, Kodiak Island, Kenai Peninsula, Anchorage, the Matanuska-Susitna valleys, and Fairbanksform organized boroughs by January 1, 1964. Furthermore, 21 Rural Education Attendance Areas were established by the Legislature in 1975. This created regional divisions of the unorganized borough for the purpose of establishing rural
school districts. Many REAAs were later absorbed into organized boroughs. ==Regional Educational Attendance Areas==