Should there be more counties?

There are several reasons I found compelling enough to propose new counties. Some places just happen to be in a county with a large area and boundaries that seem to be completely arbitrary. How closely related are Needles, California, and the county seat of its county, San Bernardino, more than two hundred miles away across a desert and a mountain range? Others are larger cities that certainly would be county seats if they did not happen to be located in the same county as another sizeable community with its own right to host the county government. The Melbourne-Palm Bay area in Florida, for example, most likely controls southern Brevard County economically: why shouldn't it control the region politically as well? There are admittedly a few places on the list that are just there for my own amusement, and probably have no more right to their own county than most non-county seats. Since this is my list, I suppose I'm allowed.

Many of the communities that I would award with new counties may not have merited this distinction a few decades ago. Some sunbelt communities have grown from tiny crossroads villages into major urban areas practically overnight, completely reworking the population distribution of their counties in just a few years. I rarely considered history when making my proposals, though. The dynamics of the nation's population alone are enough to justify the creation of new counties regularly, though since the 1930s, there have been more counties dissolved (5) than created (3). (This does not include Alaska, which was not organized into county-equivalents until after statehood, or Virginia, which, by declaring all cities of a certain size to be outside the jurisdiction of a county, ended up with about 35 new county-equivalents.) I haven't concerned myself here with counties that ought to be merged into others, if there are any; my interest is only in promoting the creation of new ones.

Here is a list of states which have counties that meet my criteria. Each state page begins with two maps of the state showing the current county boundaries and the county boundaries as proposed by this list. The entries for each new county give its name, county seat location, and reasons for its separation from an existing county or counties.