We live in a town of a little over 5000 people. It’s pretty rural. There are a few working farms; one of them right next to my back yard. We have a market, but no grocery store, one traffic light, two gas stations and two small restaurants. One is a crappy pizza place and the other is a small diner attached to one of the gas stations. We never eat at either. My daughter’s elementary school is the only school. Once the kids get to middle school, they take the bus to the next town over, which is larger and about 10 minutes away.
We do have a post office, archery store, barber shop, florist, hair salon and a Curves. A few of those businesses are run out of people’s homes. We only live about 15 minutes from the county’s main city, so we’re not isolated or anything.
I live in a wee town. There are two grocery stores; one is for hippies and the other is the red-neck store. Post office, one little school, a realty office and a closed library. I’m glad I live in the middle of nowhere. Just this morning I went down to the barn wearing purple plaid flannel pants, a tie-dye Tshirt and my favorite blue&white polka dotted muck boots. I didn’t even think about what Martha Stewart or Hiedi Klum would say.
Local government in Australia is a bit different from that in Australia, as you don’t have small-town local government there. The local government areas for the above are predominantly rural, with a relatively small urban centre: Swan Hill – population 20,000, area 6,100 km² Narrandera Shire – population 6,600, area 4,100 km² Leeton Shire – population 12,000, area 1,200 km² Wakool Shire – population 4,800, area 7,500 km²
Except for Deniliquin Shire – the closest to a small US town in local government, with population 8,200 and area 130 km², so mostly urban.
Only Swan Hill would have a mayor: shires have shire presidents instead, and generally they have day jobs, because the city or shire doesn’t give them enough to live on for their position.
When I was in high school, we lived in a town of around 3,500. No mayor, some kind of city council even though it’s not an incorporated city. Fire and police services were all provided through the county. It was a logging and PG&E town with tourism for hunting, fishing and hiking. Now it’s just PG&E and tourism as all the trees are gone.
A few years ago we lived in a town of 1,500. It had a mayor, it’s own police force, a volunteer fire department and a contentious city council. Politics there always struck me as a tempest in a teapot and I could never get very worked up about it. That town, however, has citizens whose families harken back to the original shysters… um… I mean settlers, yeah, settlers from 175 years ago so they seem to take every wind change as a threat to their “way of life”.
Moved to the big city (pop. 25,000), 15 miles away about 4 years ago and miss small town life, but not that last small town, which shall remain nameless for my own protection.
I grew up in a town of 362 people - we moved there in sixth grade - making 367 people in town. By the time I graduated from high school it was around 3,000. That was 20 years ago, Its now a suburb of the Twin Cities and the farms have all been turned into subdivisions.
My town has 2500 households on the tax roll but spread out over seven tiny towns. I am not a native so I can’t say I know what it’s like to live here truly, but it’s on the one hand accessible and friendly and on the other hand not anonymous at all.
My town has less than 1,000 people.
Mayor is part time.
I am the Town Attorney (also part time/contract), as well as Town Attorney for a few other area municipalities.
I live in a town of 800 people or so. It’s very much a bedroom community for the ~60,000 pop. town about ten miles away. We’ve got a school, a convenience store/gas station, a post office, a bar, a couple hair salons, and a couple of auto repair places. While school is in session, there are actually more people there than live in the town.