In the US, what are the powers of a county over the cities in it?

Factual Questions
1

I realise that this is one of those questions which might be answered differently depending on the state. I also realise that there are special cases such as the boroughs of NYC. However, I suppose/hope there are some common features of American local government that might allow for a more general answer.

As I understand it, local government functions in the US are, by default, carried out by the counties, but when a particular area within a county is incorporated as a city, then that city will carry out those functions autonomously. The territory of the city remains, on paper, part of the territory of the county, but the county retains no functions for the city, so the inclusion of the city in the county is only nominal. Is this correct? It’s the only way I can make rhyme and reason of the fact that it is, apparently, not rare in the US for a city to straddle the boundary between two counties. Does this mean that, outside incorporated cities, there is no local government other than the county, and consequently no elected local decision-making bodies? It also means that there is no sort of supervisory power of a county over the cities in it?

(The reason I’m asking is that in the jurisdiction I grew up in, Germany, counties and cities have different powers. A city might carry out some functions, and the county it belongs to carries out other functions for the cities in it - unless the city is independent, meaning it is part of no county whatsoever and combines city and county functions at the same level.)

2

Well, not really. In Hawaii, for example, the levels of government go federal, state, then county, and that’s it. Formally there is no lower local government such as city, because we’re talking about islands. I don’t think they have regional school boards either.

I think counties in Connecticut and Rhode Island are organized such that they only exist to divide the country into geographic areas, that is, they don’t have any lawmaking/government powers whatsoever.

~Max

3

Likewise the counties in the red portion of this map of Massachusetts.

4

Counties used to have more functions in Connecticut, but essentially all there “powers” were removed except the sheriffs are still appointed at the county level.

I know in Ohio, there used to be county libraries.

5

This varies greatly state to state in the USA. They key feature is that the authority of a county, city, township, etc all derives from the state, IE, Pennsylvania, Florida, etc and it is up to them how they handle the divisions. I’ve seen states where every piece of land is at a minimum in a township as well as a county, and often a city/village/town as well. And other states where if you don’t live in an incorporated town then you are just in unincorporated XYZ County.

6

I think it largely depends on what specific operation you’re talking about. For example, during the Pandemic here in Texas, the counties had the actual decision-making power in terms of masking, closures, etc… until the Legislature pulled their teeth at the state level.

Stuff like the judicial system/jails, deeds and property taxes, and some other things are still county level things, but others like law enforcement, road maintenance, fire fighting, etc… are handled by the cities within their jurisdiction.

7

In some states, there are entities that are not counties nor cities, but exist to provide specialized functions over a defined geographic area within a county. The best example are school districts, but there are also water and sewage districts, parks, etc…

In my state, Maryland, counties handle most local government business, including education. Some counties have more than 1 million people, so it’s a big deal. There are some incorporated cities, but they don’t do a lot.

8

No, the county sheriffs were eliminated in Connecticut in 2000 and replaced with state marshals.

9

I think there are also some states where cities aren’t part of counties at all, and that counties only even exist in unincorporated places. Or maybe only the big cities in the state exist apart from counties, but smaller cities might still be in a county.

New York City famously consists of five counties: Each of the boroughs is a county (though, confusingly, in some of them the county and the borough have different names).

Here in Ohio, every speck of land is part of some county or another, and every speck of land is also part of either an incorporated city, or a township. Both the county authorities and the city/township authorities have some power over some things, but I don’t know what the precise boundaries are. Cuyahoga County has a library system, but the city of Cleveland and a few of the suburbs also have their own library systems (the Cleveland libraries and the Cuyahoga libraries are almost-but-not-quite merged into a single system, but Lakewood, for instance, is completely separate). Both cities and the county have police forces, as well as a bewilderingly broad array of other entities (at least two of the universities, at least two of the hospitals, the transit system (which is entirely contained within the county), the Metroparks system (which is almost but not quite entirely contained within the county), etc.).

Ohio also has school districts, whose borders are often but not always identical to city boundaries, but even if the boundaries are identical, they’re completely independent of the cities (so, for instance, there’s no point in complaining to the mayor about the schools).

10

In New York, counties are responsible for the areas outside of cities. These are divided into areas called towns, but may also contain villages inside those towns. Individual towns have powers, usually school districts and fire districts, but the villages usually have their own elected officials and rules. There may be unincorporated areas in the mountains but I think towns and cities comprise everything outside New York City.

Counties and cities often divide powers. Using my own county as the example, a district attorney and sheriff are county-level officials, but the city has its own police and fire forces and the two court systems are separate, with the towns having their own justices. The water authority is county-level but the park system is separate. Except that the city contracts with the county to take over parks and golf courses when it can’t afford to run them. The country legislature has representatives from the city but the city council is separate and has no representatives from the county. Each town and village has its own council as well. The library system is county wide, but the budget is separate for the city and each town.

It’s an inchoate mess. Separate elections run at the county, city, town, village, school district, and court levels. Villages have their own mayors, towns their own clerks. One town elects a “highway supervisor.”

This is why elections take so long to count in the U.S. In 2022, 40 separate elections were in the county. Federal level (senator, representative); state level (governor, attorney general, comptroller, supreme court justice, state senate, state assembly), county level (legislature, judge), city level (judge), town level (council, justice, clerk, highway supervisor), and village level (mayor). That was an off-year with lots of positions not on the ballot. School districts run on a different schedule. A ballot will need to have votes assigned to five or six different levels with different boundaries, so a neighbor on the next street may have a different ballot.

The U.S. is very proud of this madness. But it complicates results immensely, because no totals can be released before each vote is properly counted and assigned to its separate election.

11

Where I am, counties provide sanitary landfills, sheriff, elections and voting stations and probably some other things I’m not thinking of right now.

The county I live in has a special function. It has its own “highway district” that runs county wide and in all the incorporated areas also. Many counties in Idaho, the roads, sidewalks and curbs are the responsibilities of the incorporated areas or counties, depending on what boundaries they are in. In my county, there is one single agency that handles all of that for the entire county, inside a city or not. There is no Boise Highway District, well there probably is, there used to be, but now there is only Ada County Highway District.

As far as cities and towns that straddle county borders, my understanding is that the city has to pay fees and taxes to both counties, show proper fire, police utility service to both counties etc. YMMV

12

There isn’t a single answer except to say that counties, villages, cities, towns etc. are creatures of the state and the state decides what powers each of them have and how they can organize themselves. For example , there may be a county police department but cities and villages within the county may have their own police departments. It’s possible that even while a city/town/village may have their own police department or fire department they may not be able to have their own department of social services. Or all towns keep their own vital records, so there is no county office to request a birth certificate from. These differences cause trouble when a someone is using a document from State A in State B which does things differently For example, State A issues birth certificates at the county level and some clerk won’t accept mine because it was issued by a city in State B.

In some states, at least some cities are not part of the county they are physically located in, other cities have a merged city/county government and NYC is of course different from everywhere else.

13

One point I want to make: Counties can have elected leaders. For example, in California every county is led by an elected Board of Supervisors.

In California, counties contain incorporated cities, and unincorporated areas (which may or may be populated). The county Board of Supervisors has complete local decision-making control over the unincorporated areas, but limited control over the cities. However, city residents are entitled to vote for the supervisors.

One special case is San Francisco, which is both a county and an incorporated city at the same time.

14

It highly depends on location and maybe how the land was originally surveyed. Metes and bounds or Townshipn& Range. for established administrative centers such as county seats that in early days served rural townships then up popped villages and towns and cities.

15

The towns have powers of their own: town boards, highway departments, zoning (if the town chooses to have zoning), and other town laws. (I sit on a Town planning board in New York State.) Incorporated villages have their own separate setups for this even though they’re physically located within a town; or more than one town, the boundaries may not coincide.

School districts and fire districts are two separate things. Their boundaries may cross towns and sometimes even counties, and their powers are different.

The county’s highway department is responsible for county roads. The town’s highway department is responsible for town roads. The state Department of Transportation is responsible for state roads. All of these roads intersect with each other and it’s not possible to get anywhere much without driving on all three types. There’s often cooperation between town and county departments for such things as getting the roads plowed.

It’s a mess. It’s our mess; we’re used to it. I don’t think it was designed; I think it just grew, and the enabling legislation grew up around it. The state could override the whole thing in theory, but not in practice; though they occasionally override some bit of it, or try to – sometimes they lose in court.

16

I think your generalization is pretty decent but I would amend it as so:

Local government functions in the US are, by default, carried out by the counties, but when a particular area within a county is incorporated as a city, then that city will carry out [most of] those functions autonomously. The territory of the city remains, on paper, part of the territory of the county, but the county retains no [few] functions for the city, so the inclusion of the city in the county is only [mostly] nominal.

As a couple others have pointed out, townships are subdivisions of counties in roughly half of US states, mostly in the north/Midwest and east/New England. That’s civil townships as a governmental subdivision, rather than survey townships which just establish boundaries for land ownership, which most states have.

I think that’s generally true here too, but less so. School districts and libraries have been mentioned, and those can be independent of county boundaries too. Police and fire can be county or city, and sometimes they share between multiple cities/counties through contract agreements.

St. Louis is a unique (or nearly unique?) situation in the US since it’s an independent city, meaning it is not part of any county. But it operates as both a city and a county. St. Louis is the only city in Missouri which operates its own “county” offices. St. Louis is a home rule city, but it is not a home rule county, thus county functions and offices are subject to state restrictions on county governments. There have been some other city/county mergers with different parameters, such as Indianapolis and Louisville, but those too are outliers.

17

Similarly in Maryland the City of Baltimore is separate from Baltimore County.

18

One of the messes is (or used to be, not sure of the current status) unincorporated
Greenburgh. This is part of the upstate town in southern Westchester county that borders on Duh Bronx. Most of the town is incorporated but a variety of hamlets and neighborhoods with no real status in the state apparently never agreed to join the incorporated portion of the town. Residents I used to know living in those ambiguously defined areas were quite proud of their independence. Even though it it gave the county direct control over them back then that had a minimal effect. Even in the fully incorporated Town of Cortlandt where I used to live (the one with the ‘t’ on the end, not the one near Binghamton) contained the independent city of Peekskill, and the villages of Croton-on-Hudson and Buchanon. It had it’s own school district for only part of the town, plus a portion of the sprawling Lakeland School District which crosses multiple town and county lines, along with a special water district I never figured out. There was always a state police presence in town with 3 different barracks but the town created it’s own out of control police dept. which was eventually defunded because it was such a liability that many residents would first call the state police or even one of the depts. in Peekskill or the villages before they’d call the town police.

We have no such problems in the 27 independent towns and cities here in RI because the counties have little to no authority over anything and none of the villages within these town have any government of their own. Altogether we are not as big as many (most?) counties in the country anyway. Never mind the fictional county and towns we have.

19

In Ohio, cities have home rule, so we can pretty make whatever legislation we want as long as it doesn’t go against the Ohio or US Constitution. Our Charter is our constitution.

Our county does have a council, like city council, and it does have an Executive like a mayor.

The county imposes a sales tax. It also sets property values. They have a court, which is used for some things but not all things as our city has a mayor’s court. They also have a Sheriff’s dept.

The county has a board of elections which is the ultimate overseer of elections, from local to federal.

Beyond those things, I can’t think of anything that our city is forced to use from the county. We opt in to their sewer system/water treatment but we could have our own. Some nearby townships use the sheriff, others have their own police dept (townships have to pay to use the sheriff’s services). As far as I know, cities all have their own PD and FD. As I said we have a mayor’s court but not every city does.

Our county does supply a lot of social services. We pay a portion of our property tax to the county developmental disabilities program, children’s services, mental health services, a library system and a park system.

Our school districts are their own entities, apart from the county, city & townships. Our district happens to encompass 2 townships, a village and a city.

20

TIL!

I knew there are two places in NYState named Pleasant Valley (though I think only one is incorporated; I might be wrong); but I didn’t know about Cortlandt. I only knew about the Cortland inbetween Ithaca and Binghamton.