Talk:Oxford County, Maine

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County seat

I know the municipality in which it's located is organized as the Town of Paris--and South Paris pretty much exists only as a Census Bureau and Post Office designation--but Maine.gov's page on Oxford County does list the county seat as "South Paris." Ripogenus77 (talk) 15:02, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

What is a county seat anyway? Is it a location (address) or is it a specific municipality? If the former, then South Paris would be the correct one. If the latter, then it would be Paris. Also, the county website does use Paris rather than South Paris. So, which is it? --Polaron | Talk 15:09, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

No clear answer here (state statutes) as to what exactly constitutes a county seat. My best guess is that the municipality is the county seat, from what's implied by various provisions. It could be that whoever created the state's web page on Oxford County incorrectly(?) listed South Paris because of the county offices' mailing addresses. Presumably whoever administers the county's own website is/was in a better position to know... so I'd propose going with what the county website says. I suppose confusion stems from the fact that federal government policy (USPS, Census Bureau) and state law sometimes have conflicting definitions as to what constitutes a community in Maine, especially in light of the New England states' unique form of municipal organization. Ripogenus77 (talk) 15:38, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

I would assume that Paris is the seat: not only because of what's said above, but because NACo (quite reliable, although of course not definitive) lists Paris as the county seat. I ran a search, by the way, through all the state statutes, and noted that law libraries are required to be established in certain places statewide:

There must be a system of law libraries accessible to all citizens within the State, under the supervision of the State Court Library Committee.
These libraries must be located in [list follows]:

Of these seventeen, fifteen are municipalities that are county seats, one is Caribou (I guess they figured Aroostook was just too large to have just one?), and the last was South Paris. Reading this text indicates to me that they mean where you'd go if you were going there (if you want the Somerset library, you'd say "I'm going to the library at South Paris"), not the official location. Perhaps it would be better to say something like "the county offices have a South Paris address"? It's just a pity that Maine isn't similar to Vermont in this way: see Title 24, Part I, Chapter 1, §13 of the Vermont Statutes Annotated — no question where the county seat is there :-) Nyttend (talk) 16:09, 2 July 2008 (UTC)