There are separate hierarchies for cities (".ci.oh.us", school districts (".k12.oh.us"), public libraries (".lib.oh.us"), and probably others I'm not aware of. It seems like there could be name collisions between those different entities that would necessitate the additional layer.
Edit:
Per my parent comment I screwed this up and misremembered the hierarchies. The locality name comes first for localities, so you'd be looking at things like:
ci.medina.oh.us - City of Medina
co.medina.oh.us - County of Medina
medina.k12.oh.us - The Medina City School District
medina.lib.oh.us - The Medina County District Library
Oh, I agree. It's logically guessable and the right hierarchy. It'd also never fly. >smile<
> So far as I am aware, every US state is split into counties...
re: falsehoods - Alaska has no counties. Louisiana has "Parishes". Connecticut and Rhode Island have counties but no county governments. Also, see Townships.
Sometimes I think our country would be better understood as 50-something separate countries, kind of like the EU, except without the general goal the EU has of increasing amounts of cooperation and convergence. Since in America, everything that’s different from one place to another is generally different because somebody very influential wants it to be. As programmers I feel like all this inconsistency drives us crazy because it seems pointless, but as a citizen, I can see how it would be a tremendous waste of effort to try to force national standardization merely for standardization’s sake when we have so many real problems that need to be addressed.
Virginia is another edge case here, where cities aren't part of counties and are directly under the state. If you look at a map, you'll see holes in a bunch of counties where the cities are, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_counties_...
All of these are tiny exceptions compared to the vast number of counties within US States. However, reality is made of exceptions! All things considered, it is interesting and important to have local exceptions in a nation IMHO.
And even where everything seems the same on paper, different states can handle things wildly differently.
Some the counties run almost everything except where a large city is, some the county does almost nothing, and everything is tied to whatever the biggest town is.
it turns out, cities are among the least well-defined geographical features in local government of the USA. There are many odd and unusual arrangements at the city level. The US Census maintains a collection of more clearly defined entities.
I can think of lots of exceptions to the part about substate public entities existing within counties; CA, for instance, has quite a number of JPAs and similar entities that involve multiple counties, or entities from multiple counties, for some purpose; e.g., The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, etc.
You can't get rid of the "co". It's needed for disambiguation.
For example, here in Texas, the City of Dallas is located in Dallas County, but they are separate things. If you want to pay a parking ticket that you got in the City of Dallas, you need to go to the city's web site. If you want to pay your property taxes, you need to go to the county's web site.
Also, the City of Austin is located in Travis County. There is an Austin County, but it's 100 miles (160 km) away. The only connection is that they are both named for Stephen F. Austin.
Interesting. Here in CA we have a few fused “City and County of X” governments. In those cases, the borders are one and the same, and there is only one governmental entity in charge of it. Mostly, this is convenient.
(I’m not OP but) Since there is only one entity, you would probably create a simple website redirect for the redundant lower level, and keep everything (web, email) at the domain (the one that would have been a “county” anywhere else). E.g. sf.ca.gov
Would be better to just get rid of the “co” layer.