Counties, Cities, and Special Districts
Counties were created as sub-units of state government. Counties were created by the state to provide services such as law enforcement (sheriff), tax assessment, social services, etc. without making you travel to St. Paul or Pierre or Bismarck. If you think about what life must have been like (especially in rural areas) for your ancestors, imagine having to travel all the way to the State Capitol to do something like file a land claim, or bring a lawsuit against your neighbor over a property line dispute. So, in order to make it easier to access those things, the State governments created these sub-divisions called "Counties." Even today, if you buy a piece of property, where do you go to file the deed? You go to the County Courthouse, which has something called a "Register of Deeds" office (or something similar, depending on what state you're in). If you want to protest the valuation of your property tax, where do you go? There's another office in the Courthouse, called the "Tax Assessor" (again, some states and counties might use variations on the name, but there's SOME office in your County Courthouse or Office complex that handles this).
On the other hand, there are things that the state can’t or won’t do. In the 18th and 19th centuries, cities formed because people started concentrating their homes and businesses in certain areas, and they needed more fire and police protection than what the local county could offer. Groups of citizens in these concentrated areas would get together and apply to the state for a “charter”, which is nothing more than a document giving someone or some group the right to do something (form a business, trade in a certain industry, or, in this case, form a city government). In the 20th and 21st centuries, city powers expanded to include other functions, such as parks, streets, garbage, sewer, water, libraries, arenas, bus and train services, etc. Cities are generally limited by the Dillon Rule (named after the Iowa Supreme Court Justice and Federal Appeals Judge who authored it), which is a judicial principle that says that cities can only perform those functions that are specifically given to them by the state government. Later on in this lecture, we’ll talk more about cities, and the types of charters that cities can get. This is important because, under the Dillon Rule, the charter can either give the city government a lot of power and authority, or it can really limit that power and authority.
Special Districts are the third major type of local government. These are independent boards or districts. Usually, they have a governing body that's separately elected by the voters, although in some cases they're appointed by somebody else (other city or state officials). Oftentimes, they have taxing authority (meaning they can assess property taxes or fees on their own, without getting permission from the city, county, or state). In most cases, they one purpose (School Boards are only in the business of education, for example, and Park Boards are only in charge of building and maintaining parks and recreation facilities). In some states, there are Special Districts which do all sorts of things (some eastern seaboard states and rural western states have Water Boards, although for different reasons; and in some suburban areas, rather than having each small city run a fire department, a Fire District Board might be formed to provide that one service to that entire area). Pretty much all of us live in at least one Special District, since all of us have a local K-12 school system that serves our area (one of the outside readings notes that in some urban areas, the schools are under the authority of a local official, such as the mayor, but those exceptions are few and far between). Those of you in North Dakota might (depending on where you live) have a local Park Board: that’s a Special District, created by the state, with authority to tax its residents for the purposes of running park and recreation facilities. Those of you in Minnesota (or in smaller North Dakota communities) don’t have these; instead, your local parks are probably run by the city government.
Municipal (City) Charters
As indicated earlier, states can limit the powers of city government under the Dillon Rule. The way that they do is through the charter; the type of charter that a city has indicates what types of functions the city will be allowed to perform. As a reminder, the "charter" is the document (issued by the State government) that authorized a group of people to form a city government, in a particular location. If you walk into your local City Hall, I wouldn't be surprised if the original copy of the City Charter (dated from a century or more ago) is hanging up on the wall in the lobby, outside the Mayor's office, or in the Council chamber room (the room where they hold City Council meetings).
General Law: These are the most commonly-found type in the USA, especially in smaller communities. Under this type (sometimes called “Statutory Cities” or Statutory Municipalities”), state laws will lay out a system of “classes” of charters, usually depending on population. For example, a state’s laws might say that all cities with populations under 1000 are Class I cities, and that Class I cities can provide police and fire, and can own parks up to X number of acres. For populations between 1001 and 2500, those might be Class II cities, which can do all of those things, plus run municipal courts and contract ambulance services. These are just theoretical examples: in the real world, the laws are a little more detailed, but the point should be obvious – city functions are based strictly on population (a few states use taxable land value as the measure of a city’s size, but most use census population). There is another form of these (but pretty rare) where the state has one charter form for all cities, regardless of size or valuation. The nice thing about this system is that as populations change, or as technology or needs change, the state doesn’t have to be constantly re-issuing charters: the state just has to change one law, redefining or adding a new municipal power which then applies to ALL cities under that classification. (*NOTE THAT THESE NUMBERS are just examples – the population cut-offs, as well as which cities offer which services, are going to vary from state to state).
Home Rule: A home-rule city has the right to amend its own charter and determine its own powers, as long as the city’s citizens agree to the amendment. For example, in May 2005, the citizens of Fargo voted on an amendment to their city charter which would have extended the FargoDome’s sales tax for several more years to fund a new downtown arena. The state of North Dakota doesn’t usually allow cities to run sports arenas, but those cities that have home rule charters (like Fargo and Grand Forks) can take on those kinds of functions if they (and their citizens) choose to do so. That amendment failed, by the way, but the decision to NOT fund that function was strictly that of the citizens of Fargo, and not anyone else’s. In 2018, the citizens of Fargo voted for an amendment to their charter to adopt a unique form of election called "Approval Voting". North Dakota law lays out some options for how City Council members and Mayors are elected, but because Fargo is a Home Rule city, they could use options that weren't on the state's list.
Special Legislation: These are found in many parts of the country, although they tend to be most limiting in the South (especially Alabama and, historically, in Georgia). Under special legislation (also called "local law") provisions, a city must get specific approval from the Legislature before doing something. A good example is bonding (borrowing money) in Alabama: the 1905 Constitution set a $50,000 limit on the amount that a city can borrow. Now, in 1905, $50,000 was a lot of money: today, as you probably know, it can scarcely buy you a large garage. If an Alabama city wanted to borrow money to build an extension costing more than $50,000 to its fire station, for example, it would have to wait for permission from the Alabama Legislature in order to do so. These types of provisions have tended to really limit what cities can do. The debate over the Twins and Vikings stadiums also serves as a good example of special legislation provisions in Minnesota: Hennepin and Anoka Counties were asking for specific permission to impose sales taxes within their own borders in order to fund those stadiums. Hennepin County needed such a law to help fund its portion of the new Twins Stadium, and Anoka County (where the Wilf family tried to put the new Vikings Stadium before the current US Bank Stadium site was chosen) would have needed a similar law to be approved by the Legislature. You might recall, from an earlier unit, that Alabama's Constitution is the longest (in terms of pages and word count) in the country: much of that language pertains to very specific provisions that only apply to a particular county or an individual town or city. There's been a long-running debate in Alabama over getting rid of that old Constitution, and stream-lining it: one of the major barriers to that is resistance from legislators to give up that ability to pass "local laws." You might also remember, from that same unit, that Georgia was the last state (in 1983) to completely re-write its Constitution, from scratch, using the Constitutional Convention method. One of the biggest changes made at that time was to prohibit the Legislature from passing "local laws" that only affected a single county, school district, or city. This change came after a decades-long debate over whether the Legislature should be able to limit what cities could do, especially in the fast-growing suburbs around Atlanta. So, while this was an issue, historically, in Georgia, it's no longer the case. But it's still possible in many states.
Forms of Governance in Cities
Historically, in most of the United States, there are three primary forms of governance "models" used in cities. Actually, there are four (the NLC articles talk about this), but unless you live in New England, you've probably never heard of a "Town Meeting". That's a unique form, used only in the northeastern states, where local decisions are mostly made at an annual or bi-annual meeting of all of the residents of the town. For our purposes, we're only going to talk about the three that tend to exist across most of the country.
Mayor-Council: These are the most commonly-found type. The title is misleading, because it implies that all of these have a Mayor who sits in some position of greater authority over the rest of the City Council. This is not necessarily the case: some have Mayors who are elected city-wide, and have special authority over council meetings. Some cities have city-wide elected Mayors who only have the title (and have no more power than any other council member). Still others have a Councilmember who holds the title of Mayor because he/she was elected to that post by his/her fellow Councilmembers. What all of these have in common is the idea that the elected officials have responsibility for city employees: the Council is responsible for hiring and firing the police chief, the parks superintendent, the fire chief, etc (or, in some strong Mayor systems, the Council might have to defer to the Mayor’s authority on those decisions, but the decision still rests with an elected official). Several of the outside readings (and the text) contain discussions of “weak Mayor” and “strong Mayor” systems. That's not a FORMAL distinction (at least not legally), but it's common for Public Administration scholars to classify cities as "strong" or "weak", usually based on whether the Mayor has power to do things like veto laws, propose a budget, hire and fire people without a full vote from the City Council, etc.
Council-Manager: The principle behind this system is that city administration is insulated from politics, by putting a professional administrator (usually someone with a degree in Urban Planning or Public Administration) in charge of day-to-day operations. The City Manager is the only city employee hired or fired by the Council, and then that Manager, in turn, is responsible for hiring, firing, and supervising all of the other city employees. Therefore, these are different because the Council doesn’t share direct authority over the department heads, but they are only responsible for the hiring and supervision of the City Manager. In Moorhead, for example, up until a couple of years ago, the City Manager was a fellow named Mike Redlinger. The City Council decided to let him go, not because they were necessarily unhappy with the job he was doing, but because there some employees (particularly the Deputy City Manager) that the Council wanted fired, and when Redlinger refused to fire them, the Council decided to fire him instead (because he was the only employee that the Council had direct authority over). You will probably notice, when reading through the descriptions of this type in the book and outside sources, that the concept of a "Mayor" is kind of missing from many of these systems (many of them have an official called "Council Chair", whose primary job seems to be the run the Council meetings). Now, some Council-Manager systems do have an official called a "Mayor" (Moorhead happens to be one), but the charters in these types of cities usually give that official very little to do.
Commission: There are less than 200 of these remaining in the United States. The key feature of these is that each council member (Commissioner) becomes the head (or at least the supervisor) of one of the city departments. So, one Commissioner is in charge of the Police and Fire Departments, another is in charge of Water, Sewer, and Garbage, a third is in charge of Streets and Transportation, etc (that’s just a theoretical example; the breakdown of which departments fall under which Commissioner are going to vary from city to city). Rather than collectively sharing oversight among the entire council, each individual Commissioner has absolute singular authority over one or two city functions. West Fargo and Fargo are both considered Commission systems: each of the five members (the four Commissioners and the Mayor) have responsibility for a particular “portfolio” of departments and functions (although both require votes of the entire Commission to make certain types of decisions). As the book mentions, a common critique of this form is that there’s often no common agreement on overall city policy – too often, the decisions made by a particular department are highly dependent on the personality and/or political preferences of the individual Commissioner who leads that department.
A Note on Indian Reservations
I often hear students say things like: “Did you know that American Indians don’t have to pay taxes?” or “Why can’t the Sheriff give speeding tickets to Native Americans?” Statements like this all make a common assumption (which is a false assumption) that all Native tribes are treated equally in relation to state and federal law. Because Indian Reservations are creations of federal law (and not the states), we really can’t say that they are local governments. Some (like Red Lake) are almost like little countries on to themselves; others, like White Earth, are subject to state taxation while having their own police authority; still others (like some in Montana and Washington) are little more than land grants, with no real governing authority given to the local council.
The key to understanding this is that each tribe made its own treaty with the federal government: some of these treaties date from as early as the 1830s, and some weren’t negotiated until almost 1890. Each individual treaty has different provisions: some give the tribe lots of individual powers, whereas others force the tribe to work in conjunction with the state government in certain areas. Therefore, there’s no universal statement that can be made about Reservations, and, because of their unique status as creations of FEDERAL treaties, we can’t really talk about them as a form of local government (because all other local governments that we’ve talked about are creations of the STATES, rather than the federal government).