Municipal government

In the United States, Municipal government means the government of a municipality as a distinct jurisdiction within a state, commonwealth or territory. A municipality is a local government corporation, which may have the status of a city, town, or village. The word "town" is something of a non-entity in American law. In most states, "town" is just another word for "city"; in some states, it is another word for "village"; in a few states, a town is an intermediate-size jurisdiction between a city and a village.

A few municipal jurisdictions, including New York City and San Francisco, are metropolitan municipalities - consolidated city and county governments. The metropolitan municipality (or consolidated city-county) is a special type of municipality which is simultaneously a local government corporation and an administrative division of the state - thus, they exercise their own autonomous powers as a city, and the exercise the degree of state sovereignty which the state government has assigned to counties and townships.

Municipal government was the basis for the computer game, SimCity.

In the United States, municipalities are legally distinct from townships and counties. A county - "parish" in Louisiana, "borough" in Alaska - is an administrative division of a state, and a township is an administrative division of a county. As such, counties and townships implement state law and policy, and exercise powers conferred directly upon them by the state legislature. Municipalities are autonomous jurisdictions incorporation within the state. The degree of autonomy depends upon the type of municipality.

In most states, cities are completely autonomous jurisdictions that are not subject to the authority of county and township authorities. Conversely, most villages have only limited autonomy and are subject to the controlling authority of county and township authorities. Cities typically have a mayor, who may be head of state but not head of government, or both head of state and head of government. The same officer in a village, who may have either status noted as for mayors, is usually called "president" of the village, not "mayor."

The two most common forms of municipal government are Council-Manager and Mayor/President-Council. These replaced the formerly popular Municipal Commission, which was used by cities.

Common rights and responsibilities of a city include:

Power to tax residents, business entities within the city, and non-resident employees of city business entities
Power to incur public debt and the responsibility to repay it
Responsibility for providing and maintaining essential public services, such as streets, water and sewage, refuse and recycling pick-up, and so on.
Responsibility for public safety through establishment and operation of a police force, a fire department, and so on.

A village or, in Michigan, a charter township (a distinct jurisdiction between a township and a city) may have the option to provide certain services associated with city government, but they do not usually have the responsibility to provide them. In any case, their actions are subject to approval by the township and county in which they are located.

In California, the taxation power of municipalities is strictly limited by Proposition 13, a 1978 amendment to the California Constitution.

Municipalities range in size from the very small (e.g., Village of Dexter, Michigan, with about 2,500 people) to the very large (e.g., Los Angeles, California, with about 4 million people), so municipal governments likewise range in size from the very small to the very large. Most municipalities have a planning department or planning commission. Whether they have other departments or contract out for services (such as accounting and legal services) depends upon the size of the municipality, whether it's a city or village, and so on. San Francisco, for example, a metropolitan municipality with a population of about 750,000 has an elected city-county attorney, public defender, and district attorney. The City of Ypsilanti, Michigan, with a population of about 24,000, contracts for legal services with a local law firm, and - as an ordinary municipality (as opposed to a metropolitan one) - does not have its own criminal prosecutor or public defender.

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