All this talk about being mayor of a town that’s between 6000 and 9000 people makes me wonder about other people’s experiences in small towns. There are towns near me of that size and most don’t have full-time mayors.
My town is even smaller, about 1500 people. The town I grew up in had 250, roughly, and we didn’t have a mayor at all.
Any other small town dwellers here?
I was until recently, when i got sick of the lack of available women my age, employment options, and anything to do besides sit in the single bar with the half dozen regulars, and moved in with a friend in a city.
My town had 1500 people, and the mayor was part time. Its normal for a city with 5000+ people to have a full time mayor.
I do. My town has around 6000 people in it. Despite it being hard as hell to find a job here at the moment, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. A lot of what happens out in the larger world just doesn’t effect us. You can still rent 1 bedroom apartments for between $350 and $600/month, you can get 3 bedroom houses for as low as $500 a month. If you’re looking to purchase you can find good homes in good neighborhoods as low as $80k, with the average being around $145k.
We’re in a pretty good location as well. An hour’s drive will get you to Atlanta, Gainesville, Athens, or a few other big cities where there’s good jobs, colleges, and a decent night life.
I’m another one from a small town.
Where I am now, in west central Indiana, the population of our little town is probably around 200 or so. We’re about 3 miles from the nearest big town, and about 15 miles from the nearest city, which is in the next county. We’ve got a post office, no stores, one bar, and two or three stop signs. We have no fire department, as it couldn’t get funding to stay in operation. We have to rely on the big town 3 miles away for our fire department needs. We have no mayor, but we do have the semblance of a town board. and the county sheriff’s department is about 20 miles away, and that is what we rely on for our policing needs.
“I was born in a small town…”
Lets see
Swan Hill: 10000
Grong Grong: 50 (10 kids in the school)
Yanco Small but can’t remember number
Moulamein: 500 (28 kids in secondary department 2 in my year)
Deniliquin: 8000
The town I live in now is only slightly larger than the range specified in the OP.
We don’t have a mayor but we do have a board of selectmen. From what I can tell they generally have “day jobs” as well, they don’t get paid anything like a living wage for being on the board.
We have full time police, fire, schools, etc.
I lived in Nederland, Colorado about 25 or so years ago. Pretty small, but I don’t actually remember the population. It’s at around 1400 now.
My current town had around 10k or so when I moved here. We’re up around 20K now.
Nice to have you back, jsgoddess.
The town in which I grew up had about 1500 people. I don’t think we had any kind of mayor or anything. Just the typical small town stuff…a post office, a couple of schools, some stores, a maximum-security prison complete with death house. 
My graduating class was 88 people. Everyone was pretty much friends with everyone else. That and the familiarity are pretty much the only things I ever miss about living in my hometown. There certainly wasn’t much to do. You either went to the movies, went out to eat, or stayed in and watched movies and played video games. Not that I’m complaining. Those were some of the best times of my life.
I live in a town of about 1700. The mayor and council are part-time (the pay, if any, is minimal). We have an administrator who is a full-time employee, a part-time town clerk, a utilities billing clerk, and full-time water supervisor and 2 maintenance employees. The police are full-time employed (there are about 3) and the fire department/EMS is all-volunteer.
I think the school is the largest employer in town.
Grew up in an Ohio town of 1200, finished high school in Iowa City (then about 40,000 including students) and have lived and worked in a town of 2500 for the past 35 years. I’ve been happy, although the children got out of here as quickly as they could.
i grew up in towns of 2000, 4000 & 6000 population. (now my block has more people than that & my neighborhood is bigger than the population of Alaska.)
mayor was elected and a full time position. if my experience in idaho & norcal is anything to go by, Palin is getting ratfucked and payback’d for every karmic infraction imaginable by her neighbors, homies and extended clan right now.
Larger than some mentioned here, Marietta, Ohio is a town of about 14000 people. I run one of the local newspapers here in town and good Lord above, the way the political scene functions is scary. The town and region (the whole county has only 64K people in it) is basically run, and has been, by a cadre of about 300 people. I just don’t think they’re very good and too many of them have their positions due to family status and such.
Ew.
I grew up in a small town of about 5200 people. It’s a bit bigger today, but not much - not even big enough for its own McDonalds! I greatly enjoyed growing up there - I got to participate in all sorts of things in school that I would neven have been good enough to do in a bigger school, the people were generally nice and helpful, ahnd we were fortunate enough to have some very good teachers in the school system. I had great friends from that time (far too long ago) that I still touch base with. Politically, the people were (and still are) quite conservative and don’t generally have an appreciation for the bigger world beyond. The general attitude is that some education is fine, but you can certainly overdo it. There’s a general aversion to being too ambitious, which definitely affected my own professional development as I ventured out. But overall, I wouldn’t trade that time for anything.
Mrs. No.9 also spent some of her childhood in a small town (smaller than mine, I think), and wouldn’t go through that again for pretty much anything. So it’s clearly a case of YMMV.
I am living just outside (I probably can throw a rock into the town limits) of a small town of around 4,000. My wife and I have lived in big cities and small towns and we looked specifically for a community like this one. The people are wonderful, even tolerant of “characters” like me. I injured my knee recently and as I was resting on the couch, the door bell rang. There stood a man I had never seen before holding a pair of crutches. He said he had heard down at the local McDonalds (yes we have one) that I was hobbling around so he brought me some that he had used earlier in the year. We invited him in and had coffee. Well he and my wife preferred tea.
Besides editing the local newspaper, I announce the local football games in the fall (we won last night 45-6 - as compared to last year where we lost all but one game). During the summer I teach tennis at the local recreation commission. There are three schools in town, an elementary, middle and high school. My wife teaches at the high school and coaches the debate and forensics teams and directs the high school plays (not the annual musicals - the music teacher does that).
We have three fast food places, a couple (maybe four) cafes, a nice restaurant, a couple of bars, a single grocery a couple of clothing store, a discount store and two video stores (one has all the Spanish titles) and the like.
During the gas crunch this summer, my wife and I bicycled everywhere in town. In a small town, I personally think the only reason to drive anywhere is to show you washed your pickup recently.
You lived in Ned? I love it up there, I was considering a move to Boulder when Mrs. P put the kabash on it
To the OP - I live in a small town that fit’s your criterion. The mayor is a buddy of mine, he comes over to help me with my welder, [I suck at welding, and that’s his profession]. He think’s the Palin pick is a huge mistake, and he’s a republican. I think part of Palin’s celebrity from Mayor to Gov, is something that can happen only in Alaska, well maybe Maine, but Alaska for sure.
McCain shot himself in the foot with his pick.
Living in a capital city now, but lived and worked on an island last year (Rathlin), with a population of 90 or so. It rocked.
We have a mayor in our town the size you asked about.
The mayor of Montello was just removed and it’s a smaller population. 1,043 people
My town is sorta like nonacetone’s little town. Pop. 200, post office, bar, cafe open for breakfast and lunch, a gas station, barber shop, grain elevator, and a John Deere dealership.
No law enforcement, but the mayor will chew your ass if your dog runs loose. We do have a fire department – it’s all volunteer, but we have a firehouse and all the equipment, including a nearly new pumper. At least I think it’s a pumper, it’s big and red and we have to keep it in a heated building. 
I’ve seen film from when the town was thriving. George Reeves was born here so there was a few minutes of film from his Biography special. We had three blocks full of businesses and a school. A fire took a lot of it. Now there’s just one block with businesses on both sides, and one of those buildings collapsed a couple of years ago.
I like it here but it’s kinda scary. Our mayor (elderly, retired) and one city council member do a lot of maintenance (unpaid). Only a couple of people are knowledgeable about the infrastructure – the sewer lines, storm drains, water tower, etc. If something happened to them, I don’t know what we’d do. I suppose we’d have to hire someone.
We have a part-time clerk and a part-time treasurer (the mayor’s daughter-in-law). The mayor’s son does snow removal and towing. I’m on the city council and my husband mows the parks and city property. Another city council member takes care of the sewage lagoon, and the clerk grazes her sheep on some city-owned land so we don’t have to mow it. It’s kinda like an extended family and it works well when everyone gets along, but that hasn’t always been the case.
I like what Obama has said about revitalizing small towns. I don’t know if he meant towns this small, but I hope so.
Village of 2,000 (actually about 15 miles from Madison). We don’t have a mayor but we do have a president and a village board. I doubt they make any money for their time. I also don’t know why we have a president rather than a mayor. And we aren’t big enough for a McD’s but we do have a Subway!