This is common all across the country. With lots of different details about which services the county “sells” to the towns/cities/villages as a package deal and which are a la carte.
In my fully-suburbanized county (Broward Florida) the fire/EMT service is a subdivision of the Sheriff’s office. So a city can have their own police department and buy fire/EMT services from the county if they want. But not vice versa; once you choose to use the county Sheriff’s office for LE, you get their fire/EMS too. The other major infrastructure service cities here buy is the water supply and/or sewerage service.
In New York state, there are three levels of government; the state, the counties, and the towns. The state is divided up into counties and every county is divided up into towns. So everywhere in New York is part of the state and a county and a town. (This is ignoring New York City which has its own separate system.)
There are also cities and villages. These are specific incorporated communities. There are plenty of places in the state which are not inside a city or a village. Cities and villages almost always provide their own public services to their residents, although the specific types of public services can vary.
Confusing the issue is that people don’t usually talk about villages; the entities which are legally defined as villages are generally called towns. Which can be confusing because a town and a “town” are two different things. To make it even more confusing, sometimes a village that has a certain name will be located outside of the town that has that same name.
In Wisconsin, there are three possible government organizations below the County: city, village, or town. Each has different levels of authority; city has the most (like Milwaukee, Green Bay, or Madison), next is village (Egg Harbor, Ephraim), then whatever is left over is a town. So a town might not be a cluster of businesses as you might think, but just an area that is NOT a city or a village. Most towns are quite rural.
Within a town there might be unincorporated areas; places with commonly used names, but ill-defined boundaries, and no separate government (Valmy, Institute, Carlsville).
BTW, although you have seen signs when entering towns in Wisconsin, there is no law that requires such. Our town didn’t have any signs like that until I suggested we make them, and one reason not to was that all signs cost money and new signs weren’t in that year’s budget.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but it’s likely the buildings and services you observed were part of county facilities, not the unincorporated area. Or, you thought the unincorporated areas were “towns” but they actually weren’t towns in the Wisconsin sense.
In addition to the tax stuff, some people prefer to have a low-service local government and consider the additional services that an incorporated municipality might offer to be wasteful or intrusive.
In Queensland, there are three levels of government - Commonwealth (Federal) State (Queensland) and Local Government (City/Regional Council; known as Local Government)
Most things are provided by the Commonwealth or State governments (Emergency Services are the state government’s problem, for example), so the City/Regional council handles things like roads (not main highways though; they’re state or commonwealth responsibility), water, sewerage, rubbish, zoning, animal control, building and zoning approvals, and so on.
A local government area can be huge and have many towns and cities in it - Bulloo Shire, for example, is nearly 75,000sq km, while the City of Gold Coast includes not just the famous holiday area, but numerous small towns and villages all along the coast and in the hinterland as well.
Did not know this about Damascus. Sure beats my Oregon disincorporation go to: Juntura. Decided to go this way in 1976. For a tiny town like this the overhead of a town government isn’t worth it. And that’s “big” compared to some other tiny Eastern Oregon 'burbs.
There’s a bigger former city in the Portland area: Vanport. Reached 40k+ during WWII, was about 18k when the flood “disincorporated” it.
Seems to me like part of the issue is this American thing of being able to tax the same concept (specifically, income) at multiple levels of government. Are there any other countries which do this?
Martini Enfield, Australia doesn’t sound too different from the US in that regard, except that your federal government probably has more power than ours, and it sounds like your local government areas might be designed to have comparable population to each other, rather than comparable area as is typical in the US. But local roads are in fact one thing local governments are in charge of: You can often tell, for instance, when you cross the line from one city or suburb into another, because one’s doing a lot better job of fixing the potholes.
IMO the big thing that’s different about the US is that we don’t have one system. We have at least 50 systems. Most are sorta similar, but there are lots of severe outliers. And this is true whether we’re talking local government or license plates or commercial life insurance or electricity supply or …
The thing that continues to amaze me are the Americans who confidently post “In the USA it’s done like <this>” for their own local definition of <this>. Even if they’ve never left their own state even once in their lives, they have been reading the 'Dope for awhile.
The USA: we might be kinda silly sometimes, but we’re *always *inconsistent.
Very few cities/districts/counties in the US have income taxes. PA being something of an outlier here.
The well known ones, like New York City, subsume county lines so there’s no dual county-city tax. So county and city income tax isn’t a thing. And disincorporation would not generally increase income tax revenue. Almost certainly the opposite.
Typically real estate taxes are additive that way though. You’ll usually pay one rate on one assessed valuation to one entity: typically the county.
But it will consist of a bunch of sub-rates allocable to the state, the county, the municipality, and various other taxing jurisdictions like the regional school system or regional pollution control board or … . Each of which has their own geographic boundaries.
Said another way, your land is sitting at the bottom of a pile of overlapping Venn diagrams and you pay something to every entity with whom you intersect.
In New Jersey unincorporated does not mean no local government. It doesn’t really have a legal definition. It’s pretty much what an area that is part of a township was traditionally called. Sometimes they were historically separate towns or areas that once had no local government but later combined into one township. For instance Somerset NJ well defined as an area but has no legal boundaries. Mailing addresses say Somerset NJ because the post office is in that area and that’s the name given to the ZIP Code. But Somerset is actually in Franklin Township. The police cars say Franklin. The high school is Franklin High School. Their mayor is the mayor of Franklin Township not Somerset. There are tons of examples. In some towns those old traditional boundaries are still important. In others the meanings have faded and maybe it’s just a nickname for the section of town that some people remember.
Anyone who watched Band of Brothers heard another example. Dick Winter’s friend Lew Nixon says he can get him a job at the Nixon Nitration Works in Nixon New Jersey. Nixon was an unicorporated section of Raritan Township. Due to the confusion of having too many towns named Raritan the citizens voted on a name change. One choice was Nixon. They voted for the other choice, Edison. Another unincorporated area in town was Menlo Park where a wizard used to live.
Not strictly correct. Counties are divided into towns and cities. Cities in NY are not in any town. NYC does indeed have its own structure, since it’s made up of multiple counties that joined together in 1899.
Villages are an addition level of government within a town.
Usually, but not always. Some villages just contract to the town or county for public services. As I pointed out, the villages of Greenport, Dering Harbor, and Delanson do not have a police force. Dering Harbor has not services at all.
They’re usually called villages. The confusion is the difference between a town and a hamlet. No one uses hamlet, but it’s the usual term for a village-like location in a town that’s not incorporated.
And Union City, CA, right across the Bay, has its own police force but contracts with Alameda County for fire department service. As this thread indicates, there are many arrangements.
No, but it puts the cost of infrastructure projects on employees of those areas, which is a bit uncool. The residents get to use all those roads and bridges and interstate entrances too, they just don’t have to pay for them.
On the other hand, residents don’t get as much control over the area in the tax district as they would if it were part of a proper city. They just dropped in a $500 million commercial center that, whether or not residents liked it they didn’t really have a choice, or a chance to vote or referendum it.
Very few if any people live in tax districts. They are generally zoned commercial.
People do have to pay property taxes to pay for all the services.
That is exactly how reciprocity works.
Taxes are withheld by the city or tax district you work in, and when you do your city taxes, they get reimbursed for some portion of the taxes you paid there, depending on their negotiated rate.
When I worked in a township, and lived in a city, I had to pay my city taxes annually. Now I work in a tax district, they withhold my taxes, and, while I do have to file, I do not owe my city any more money, as they both have the same % withholding.
Pretty sure they are mutually exclusive. In Ohio, you are either township or city. There is no both.
But in every other country whose tax situation I’m familiar with (IANATaxSpecialist), it is simply not possible to be taxed on income at more than one level. Having federal and state income tax is already two levels. I didn’t just ask about having income tax at the municipal level; I asked about having income tax at multiple levels.
And it’s a real pain in the butt, because if you live in one municipality but do work with several others, you have to deal with the tax code of all of them. Most of the municipalities in Ohio have joined into one of two inter-city organizations to simplify the procedures, but there’s still two of them, and there’s no real rhyme or reason to which city is in which one (for instance, Cleveland and some of its suburbs are in one, while other suburbs are in the other).
Yeah, Ohio was a pain to live in, if you lived within the incorporated limits of a village/city. They get pretty persnickety about making sure you pay those taxes, and going through the process of getting the money credited properly can be annoying. I had one year I lived in one village, moved to another, all while working in a city. I hated that tax year. :mad:
California was infinitely simpler, in that everything just got paid to the state in income taxes, or the county in property taxes. The various governmental layers all took care of getting the money to where it belonged behind the scenes. Easy-peasy.
Of course, California collects some outrageously high taxes, so I had no qualms about leaving when I did.
I worked for the cable company for a couple of years.
Those were some stupid W-2’s, as I had to have one for every incorporated area I worked in, and I worked in pretty much all of them at one point or another over the course of a year.
Our city has a pretty fine tax department, I just hand them my w-2’s and a copy of my fed taxes, and they take it from there. All I need to do is sign. (And pay if there is anything owed, but as the tax district I am in is at the same rate as the city I live in, and they have reciprocity, I haven’t had to actually pay anything in several years.) I used to have my CPA do my city taxes as well as my fed and state, but he wanted quite a bit for doing them, and they do them free.
