When I was growing up in Canada, the joke was that in the USA they even elect the dogcatcher.
A common phrase here is “They couldn’t be elected dogcatcher”, meaning they couldn’t win a vote for the least important public position. Dogcatchers would be Animal Control officers who usually aren’t, and maybe never are actually elected anywhere.
Across the entire USA, this situation is indeed rare. But in the one state of Virginia, it’s common. Virginia has 38 cities that are independent of any county.
I imagine the only real factual answer is that this supposition/hope was not justified. Basically there are at least 50 different ways of delegating the General Police Power and taxation power of the states is delegated to counties, cities, towns, villages and other subdivisions.
In my county in FL, the incorporated cities are largely autonomous with their own zoning, planning, utilities, and other functions. Small incorporated locations will contract with the county sheriff for law enforcement. One thing my county kept control of is taxation. Even in the cities, the county collects the taxes. They add the city-levied taxes to city residents and had that part over to the relevant city government.
Another Ohioan here. I agree with much of what Chronos and ZipperJJ have written about counties in the state, although in Cleveland, the mayor appoints the school board, so you could complain to him about the schools. The board used to be elected but that changed 20-some years ago IIRC. See:
Ohio counties also have their own jails, distinct from those of the cities, towns and villages within them.
I’ve never heard of an Ohio county bossing around a city, but ordinances passed by a county do apply to any cities etc. within it, unless specifically exempted. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, has an anti-discrimination law which is broader than those of some of the 59 municipalities within it, for instance.
I don’t really know what the delegation of functions are between the counties and cities in Michigan. But there are things I can tell from my long history of looking at people’s property tax bills they provide when getting their income taxes done.
Michigan has cities, villages, and townships as municipal-level divisions.
Cities are incorporated and can’t have their land incorporated by another city. Cities can span more than one county. Northville near Detroit is the obvious example, but there are others. Cities collect all the property tax on properties within their limits, but forward some of the collections to other jurisdictions such as school districts, the county, maybe other special districts that are part of the city. If you are delinquent in your taxes though, you have to pay them through the county, not the city.
All the land in the counties near where I live is part of a city or a township. Townships are mostly 6 mile by 6 mile squares with the land of any incorporated cities removed. I have no clue what they do, but they also collect any of the taxes in their borders with the exception I’ll get to next. Some townships in Michigan are “Charter Townships” which means something in terms of being like a city but not really, and I don’t really know or care about the details.
Villages are unincorporated communities that exist within townships, or within multiple adjacent townships, that collect their own local taxes in addition to the township. In Michigan different sets of property taxes are due in September and February (sometimes roughly half each, sometimes not - it’s like 90/10 where I live), and any land within a village has a third set of property taxes due to the village which are solely village-level taxes. As mentioned, it’s possible for a village to be within two different townships, which means your neighbor across the street that serves as the township border pays taxes to a different township than you. Can a village be in two separate counties? I’m not sure; I guess it’s possible.
What do they all do? I don’t know and I don’t care. But that’s what I can glean from property tax bills.
In rural Kansas where I grew up, townships are also 6 miles by 6 miles. They are responsible for the roads and bridges in that area, unless the road is maintained by the county, state, or federal government. The township is used to be responsible for providing a place to vote in all elections, but this probably is no longer the case.
Our township owned a road grader/maintainer and a small bulldozer. I think there were 2 or 3 guys who ran and maintained that equipment, billing the township for their time and fuel.
Just a note. New York’s counties (outside NYC) are divided into towns. Other states in the northeast call them townships. Small municipalities are villages rather than towns. In Pennsylvania these are called boroughs.
Town is often used in casual English for any small municipality, but only a few states have that type of town as a legal definition. For example, a Wyoming town has fewer than 4000 people, a Washington town has fewer than 1500, and a Utah town has fewer than 1000. If they grow they will be elevated to cities. Texas legally has nothing but cities and North Carolina has nothing but municipalities, which can called themselves city, towns, or villages as they see fit.
I wonder how many Americans know the answers for all 50 states. Probably only a town-sized number.
Towns in NY often have weird irregular boundaries. This probably has to do partly with the terrain and partly with the history. For a while in the 1800’s they were carving towns out of larger towns based at least partly on the desires of the residents; but it also wouldn’t make any sense to have an even 6 by 6 mile square if that landed part of it on each side of, say, one of the Finger Lakes.
And probably a fairly small town at that!
Virginia also has Arlington County, which is unitary, and has no incorporated sections.
It’s mostly history. NY was surveyed mostly as a colony, before the Northwest Ordinance and the system of surveying that land to most of the Midwest to be laid out in 6 by 6 townships. In Michigan with all the water borders, there’s tons of townships that aren’t the full 36 sq miles. But there’s only one interior county line that follows a line of water rather than the 6 by 6 township grid map. Every other border is perfectly straight after accounting for surveying errors and curvature of the Earth.
MA has 14 counties, only 6 of which still have governments. There other 8 had their governments abolished and powers subsumed by state agencies between 1997 and 2000. The counties remain as geographic and legal entities, but some of them do nothing.
I think that’s only possible in a county that adopts a charter, and only two have done that.
Not quite, there are 41 independent cities. They are:
- St. Louis, MO
- Carson City, NV
- Baltimore, MD
4.-41. Every incorporated city in Virginia.
This means the city is an independent entity that sort of serves as a county, but there is no county around them, nor is there a county that the exact same territory. There is a Baltimore county, it’s just completely separate.
Indianapolis and Louisville are city-counties, both entities exist separately but in the same territory. I can speak more to the city-county of San Francisco, they for example still retain a sheriff’s office whose main duties are to run the jails and provide courtroom law enforcement, the beat cops are SFPD.
And to even say that the six remaining counties have a “government” is a bit of a misnomer. The counties essentially only provide a sheriff (who only maintains county jails and transports prisoners, they don’t have a law enforcement function), regristries of deeds, some public safety dispatching, and some regional planning.
Most of the functions that other counties outside of New England provide are provided at either the municipal or state level in Massachusetts. There are no unincorporated areas of Massachusetts (or Connecticut or Rhode Island), everywhere in the state is either a city or a town. Counties are redundant.
Everywhere in New York State is either in a city or a town – but the towns aren’t considered incorporated; villages and cities are incorporated. (Though the towns are municipalities.) And we have counties, which have duties and abilities which the towns which compose them don’t, and vice versa.
Everybody does it differently! – I wonder whether anybody’s ever done a study to try to find out in what ways different state’s techniques work well and work poorly?
here is the mess that is los angeles county…
As someone who is very dependent on services provided by them I keep tabs on this stuff