Was traveling up in northern Wisconsin. In Wisconsin when entering a town, you are either greeted by a green sign that says “TOWN - Pop. 1234” or “TOWN - Unincorporated”
Usually the term unincorporated is for very very small towns. I was kind of confused today when I drove through 3 towns in a row that were fairly large, large hospital, schools, parks, police, fire, and businesses all over the place. Every town thoughwas unincorporated!
Is there a reason a town would choose to remain unincorporated?
The town of Ramona, California – my ol’ home-town – has a population of over 20,000. There have been several election propositions to incorporate, and the populace has voted against this every time.
The principal reason is emotional. “We’re country. We don’t want to be a city.” The word “city” poisons the dialogue, and the vote goes against it.
So, all governing is done by the county, often in conflict with actual local preferences.
In Ohio, we have West Chester Township, the largest township in Ohio with over 60,000 residents, a police department, a pretty good chunk of one of Ohio’s biggest school districts, and a couple hospitals. The business districts are pretty huge, with I don’t know how many hotels they are up to right now, but at least 5 I can think of off the top of my head right next to the interstate off one of its three entrances right next to dozens of restaurants and a 20+ screen movie theatre.
Just to its north, we have Liberty township, not nearly as big, yet, but is growing rapidly, almost doubling every census, it contains the other half of the school district, a few hospitals, and a very quickly growing business district, somebody just dropped half a billion into a commercial development off the interstate, and it’s not done yet.
These are not incorporated because the residents need to vote to incorporate. For some reason, they don’t want to. Not having a city tax is kinda cool, but good sized portions of both are under a type of taxing district that operates pretty much the same as a city, but is administered by a different city, and not having income tax means that services come out of property taxes instead. Not to mention, if you work in a different city, then they will be taxing your income, and since you don’t live in a city, none of that tax will come back to your community in the form of reciprocity. (Which to me is probably the greatest argument for incorporation.) There was also the fact that for quite some time, the county was reimbursing the cities on sales tax at a much higher rate than they reimbursed townships, even though West Chester (Union Township at the time) had a higher population.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s it was attempted to become incorporated, but the effort was fought mainly by housing developers, who didn’t want to deal with a local zoning board. The people who voted against it did so because they didn’t want to become a city, with street lights everywhere and skyscrapers. Seniors living there were told that the income tax would reduce their standard of living (even though the property tax reductions would probably more than compensate).
It hasn’t come back up for a vote in quite a while, and I don’t know which way it would go now, but to answer your question, yes, this is a huge township that has chosen to remain unincorporated.
The City of Goleta right next to Santa Barbara tried for years but failed for various reasons. Once was because the boundaries would have included Isla Vista which is an very dense college town and people didn’t want a huge number of 18 to 22 year old college students who would only live in the community for a few years deciding issues. So they took out Isla Vista from the boundaries and still lost. Then it turned out that there was a pretty large area next to Santa Barbara where the people were very against it since they would lose their “Santa Barbara” mailing address and they thought it would hurt their property values. That area is referred to as Noleta now. So they cut out those guys and got their city. Noleta is still unincorporated in the midst of two actual cities. Both Goleta and Noleta contract with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department for police work. Santa Barbara has its own cops.
If you’re a town, you generally have to pay for public services like a police department, a fire department, and highway department. If you’re not a town, you get these services as part of the county. Some people feel it’s worth it to have their own public services that just work in the town. Others feel it’s not worth it because they end up paying taxes to the town and to the county for duplicated services.
In Oregon … unincorporated communities are under county governance … part of the incorporation process is for the community to establish a city government which replaces county government … one of the most important differences is zoning laws, it’s very difficult to build a home or business building in the unincorporated county lands, much easier within an incorporated city … thus the choice for a community to remain unincorporated is usually based on an anti-growth mentality …
The difference is government services isn’t very much, we have a fairly heavy-handed state government who retains authority over schools, fire protection, environment, the courts …
It’s generally as stated: incorporation involved another layer of government and an additional tax.
There’s no actual requirement to have police, fire, etc. That’s something negotiated by the village and the township. I can think of two incorporated villages in my home town that don’t have village police (one disbanded them because of scandal).
The Village of Dering Harbor, NY has no town services at all, and a population of 11. They wanted to control their own zoning, so incorporated. All services are provided by the town and county.
Reston, Virginia is a planned community with a population of about 60,000, which just has never seen the need to incorporate. It is organized into neighborhood associations.
The entirety of Arlington County, Virginia is unincorporated, again because they don’t see a need, although with a population of 230,050 it would instantly become the state’s fourth-largest city.
Sometimes not so small. Damascus, Oregon recently disincorporated. At that time it had a population of over 10,000. OK, not a big city, but not an obscure locality either. No doubt there’ve been bigger disincorporations elsewhere.
Hawaii is unusual in that state law has no provision for local governments smaller than counties. All the local services are provided by the county.
Not all states (indeed, most do not) have the county/township/village or city structure of Ohio. Most states, especially western ones, simply have counties and incorporated communities (usually called cities, but sometimes called towns or villages or something else). In South Carolina, for example, I live in Lancaster County, in the unincorporated community of Indian Land. Currently, there are people here trying to incorporate the area into a city, because the county isn’t doing a good job of governing the massive growth of this exurb of Charlotte, NC. Unless/until that happens, we are governed by the County Council, and get our services provided by the county. No “township” structure intervenes.
The main argument against incorporation is that it will result in higher taxes (paying both the county and the city).
Meanwhile, I always wonder about the mysterious little places inside the city limits of Los Angeles which are unincorporated for no apparent reason. For example, there’s an area at 190th and Normandie, comprised of about six square blocks, completely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles, which is unincorporated. The businesses there use Torrence for their address, but they’re not in Torrence. Nothing about it is really different than the surrounding areas–just various light industry. You can tell right where the border is when you enter this small area because the street pavement suddenly is much worse, and clearly less recently resurfaced.
Note that incorporation does not mean that you have city police / fire / emt services. There is an arrangement called a “Contract City” which is incorporated, but chooses to contract those services from another entity, usually the county. Cupertino, CA, population around 60,000, does this. Cupertino does not have city police, fire or ambulance. The local cop cars say “Sheriff” on them in big letters, and “Santa Clara County” in somewhat smaller letters (if you see a normal looking city black and white, it’s a cop from an adjoining community like San Jose or Sunnyvale). I mentioned this to someone once who said, “There’s a fire station at {particular intersection in Cupertino}”. Yes, there is, but it says “Santa Clara County Fire Department” on it.
To clarify, the structure in Ohio is that every square inch of land is part of either an incorporated municipality or a township. It started off as all townships (defined by a simple grid of squares, only slightly irregular due to the boundaries of the state and the curvature of the Earth) until various communities incorporated into cities (not always with the same boundaries as the original townships).
My sister lives in another unincorporated Ohio township, Olmsted, population 13,500. It’s historically been a township because the population used to be very low. Now, though, it’s growing to the point that a lot of residents think it’s getting unwieldy to keep as a township, and are looking to either incorporate or to join one of the neighboring cities. Most likely, they’ll join the already-incorporated Olmsted Falls, which shares a school district (in fact, the schools are all in what’s currently the township), and which many residents of both consider to have a common history and heritage. But they haven’t done it yet, mostly just because these things take time.
And sometimes it’s the state. I have a cousin who’s a Pennsylvania state trooper, and while some of his duties are highway patrol stuff, most of it is local policing for some of the communities which don’t have their own police forces.
The big difference is that those taxing districts only tax people who work in those districts. People don’t owe an income tax just for living in a township, even if they happen to live in a tax district.
I don’t think that ever happens with Ohio municipal taxes, does it? Your home city might have its own separate income tax you have to pay, but I don’t think it ever gets a cut from the taxes you pay to the city you work in.
Sometimes an incorporated municipality will give up its municipal government and revert to being unincorporated. If it doesn’t provide many services, or is dysfunctional, the residents might decide that it’s not worth the cost and vote to dissolve it. In Oregon, the city of Damascus incorporated in 2004, then the voters decided to disincorporate in 2016.