De Fryske Marren
municipality in Friesland, Netherlands
De Fryske Marren (Dutch: De Friese Meren) is a municipality of Friesland in the northern Netherlands. It was established 1 January 2014 and consists of the former municipalities of Gaasterlân-Sleat, Lemsterland, Skarsterlân and parts of Boarnsterhim, all four of which were dissolved on the same day. The municipality is located in the province of Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands, and has a population of 51,778 and a combined area of 559.93 km2 (216.19 sq mi).
History
Municipal mergers are commonplace in the Netherlands: over the course of the 20th century the number of municipalities was reduced by more than half, from 1,121 in 1900 to 537 in 2000. Several of the municipalities that were amalgamated into De Fryske Marren were themselves the result of mergers as well: Gaasterlân-Sleat, Skarsterlân and Boarnsterhim were created during a series of mergers that took effect 1 January 1984. Government policy at the time of the creation of De Fryske Marren was that new mergers should have local support and be initiated by the effected municipalities themselves.
The municipalities of Gaasterlân-Sleat, Lemsterland and Skarsterlân were all rural municipalities with a relatively highly developed tourism industry. In 2007 the first two evaluated their functioning as municipalities and both concluded they could benefit from a municipal merger. The following year all three municipal councils decided they were in favour of investigating the benefits of a merger. The report from this study was publicly available for eight weeks and resulted in two negative replies.
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This entry incorporates text from “De Fryske Marren” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.