Reform processes recently reduced the number of local governments in the NT's arid zone from twenty six to four - one essentially unchanged municipality in Alice Springs and three vast Shires. This paper will focus on the governance challenges of these Shires: how the reform process not only raised issues about combining existing local government interests into larger scale organisations but also issues about people and places coming into local government for the first time; how diverse, and possibly divergent, interests within these Shires (town and country, Indigenous and settler, small and larger settlements) might be balanced in the future.