In the United States, anindependent city is a city that is not in the territory of anycounty or counties and is considered a primary administrative division of its state.[1] Independent cities are classified by theUnited States Census Bureau as "county equivalents" and may also have similar governmental powers to aconsolidated city-county or aunitary authority. However, in the case of a consolidated city-county, a city and a county were merged into a unified jurisdiction in which the county at least nominally exists to this day, whereas an independent city was legally separated from any county or merged with a county that simultaneously ceased to exist even in name.[2]
Sign marking the limits ofWilliamsburg, Virginia andJames City County, Virginia. All cities in Virginia are independent from the counties that surround them.Top 10 most populated cities in Virginia (2010).
In theCommonwealth of Virginia, all municipalities incorporated as "cities" have been "independent cities", also called "free cities", since 1871, when a revised state constitution took effect following theAmerican Civil War and the creation ofWest Virginia. Virginia's thirty-eight independent cities are not politically part of a county, even though geographically they may be completely surrounded by one. An independent city in Virginia may serve as thecounty seat of an adjacent county, even though the city by definition is not part of that county.[4][unreliable source?] Some other Virginia municipalities, even though they may be more populous than some existing independent cities, areincorporated towns. These towns always form part of a county. Incorporated towns have limited powers, varying by each charter. They typically share many aspects such as courts and publicschool divisions with the county they are within.
This municipal arrangement is in contrast to practices in other states. Cities and counties in Virginia sometimes form cooperative organizations for regional planning purposes.[5]
In the Commonwealth of Virginia, there are two classes of city. The primary difference relates to the court system. A first-class city (e.g.,Richmond) has its ownDistrict Court and also its ownCircuit Court. A second-class city (e.g.Norton orEmporia) has its own District Courts, but not its own Circuit Court. As a second-class city,City of Fairfax shares a Circuit Court withFairfax County, whileFalls Church shares a Circuit Court with adjacent Arlington County. In Virginia, a District Court is not acourt of record, so all cases are heard by a judge; alljury trials are heard in a Circuit Court.
Three older Virginia counties, whose origins go back to the original eightshires of Virginia formed in 1634 in theColony of Virginia, have or had the wordcity in their names; politically, however, they are counties. The independent cities were formed to centralize trading and legal matters as the older system of merchant ships cruising from plantation to plantation was inefficient. The colonial capital ofWilliamsburg was created for this reason, being a port on the James River. Two of these counties areCharles City County andJames City County, whose names originated with earlier "incorporations" created in 1619 by theVirginia Company asCharles Cittie andJames Cittie. Additionally,Elizabeth City County, which was originally part of the olderElizabeth Cittie, became extinct in 1952 when it was consolidated politically by mutual consent with the small City of Hampton, its county seat, and theTown of Phoebus. These merged entities became the current independent city ofHampton, Virginia, one of the largest cities of Virginia.
Carson City, the capital ofNevada, consolidated withOrmsby County in 1969, and the county was simultaneously dissolved. Debates about consolidating Carson City and Ormsby County began in the 1940s, and it required Nevada voters to approve a state constitutional amendment in 1968 to allow theNevada Legislature to perform such a consolidation.[7]
Aconsolidated city-county (such asSan Francisco,Philadelphia, orDenver), in which the city and county (or, as in Louisiana, a parish; or as in Alaska, a borough) governments have been merged. A consolidated city-county differs from an independent city in that the city and county both nominally exist, although they have a consolidated government, whereas in an independent city, the county does not even nominally exist.[2]
A "federated" city-county multi-tiered type of government such as applies between Miami andMiami-Dade County, Florida. Under this system the cities gain their powers from the Miami-Dade County Home Rule Charter (as opposed to the Constitution of Florida), with some functions being exclusive to the county that would otherwise belong to the cities in other Florida counties.
TheCity of New York, which is asui generis jurisdiction: the city has aunified government made up of fiveboroughs, each of which is territorially coterminous with acounty of New York State. The NYC counties mostly lack their own government, however they do each elect their owndistrict attorney to prosecute crimes, and most of the court system is organized around the counties.
TheU.S. Census Bureau classifies each of the counties of New York City as "Areas having certain types of county offices, but as part of another government".[9]
Washington, D.C., which is a territory that has a special status as the U.S. capital. It is not part of any state nor county; instead, theDistrict of Columbia is under the jurisdiction of theCongress of the United States in accordance with Article 1, Section 8 of theU.S. Constitution. The District was originally divided into three independent cities and two counties.Alexandria County (which now formsArlington County) and the independent city ofAlexandria werereturned to Virginia in 1846. The three remaining entities (the City of Washington,Georgetown, andWashington County) were merged into a consolidated government byan act of Congress in 1871. Congress has established ahome rule government for the territory, although local laws can be overridden by Congress. In practice, the District operates much like independent cities in the United States.
Cities and towns in New England traditionally have very strong governments, while counties have correspondingly less importance. Today, most counties in southernNew England (Connecticut,Rhode Island, andMassachusetts) have almost no governmental institutions or roles associated with them (aside from serving as a basis for court districts, along with demarcatingNational Weather Service warnings andmedia markets). Counties in southern New England still have a nominal existence, and so no city or town in those three states is truly separate from a county, although the town and the county ofNantucket,Massachusetts (on the island of that name), are coterminous, and theCity of Boston used to provide both the complete governance and the complete revenue of its county,Suffolk County, although Suffolk County also includes three much smaller cities.
Cities and towns in theUnorganized Borough ofAlaska. Alaska is not divided into counties, but has near-equivalents calledboroughs. However, unlike county-equivalents in the other 49 states, the boroughs do not cover the entire land area of the state. The area not territory of any borough is referred to as the Unorganized Borough, although it does not have its own local government. The Census Bureau divides the Unorganized Borough into several census areas which it treats as county equivalents for statistical purposes.[10]
A city or village in Ohio may be independent of anytownship because it is more or less coextensive with apaper township. The Census Bureau classifies these municipalities asindependent places.
