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If you want to be confused, just look at Virginia (Fairfax County, Fairfax City, Arlington County, Alexandria City, etc.) I don't know what the advantage is of being in a county vs. city there, but that's how it is.
Some states have certain municipalities that have consolidated their cities and counties, like Indianapolis and Miami, to avoid duplicate services. San Antonio was going to do that, but the effort lost steam for some reason.
Having many redundant and duplicate services in one county seems kind of inefficient too.
It's worth remembering that counties in Pennsylvania are slabs of beef compared to counties in Georgia. There's a reason why Georgia has 159 counties while Pennsylvania has 67, even though Georgia's not much larger. Some counties in Pennsylvania are over 1,000 square miles, which is just too large area-wise for county-based services to be efficient. This probably necessitated the development of townships. Georgia's counties are much smaller in area, so county services are more feasible.
In NJ, townships are incorporated municipalities just like any other (city, town, borough, village) and all land in the state is incorporated. The federal govt. doesn't recognize this, however, and a while back there was a federal revenue sharing program to give more money to "townships" in the Midwestern sense of the word, so a bunch of NJ municipalities changed their names to things like "South Orange Village Township" and "City of Orange Township" to try to get the money.
As for duplication of services, NJ has 566 municipalities, I think it's proportionately the most of any state. Many of these are say only 2 sq. miles, yet each has its own mayor and council, town administrator, police chief, fire chief, school district, schools superintendent, etc etc etc. It's a big mess and there's a push for consolidation right now but it'll probably never happen.
Alabama and Florida work like the second example. You have county and city, if you live inside the city limits you get city police and fire protection and other services, if you live outside the city limits (unincorporated) you must depend on county deputies and volunteer fire depts. A "city" can be as small as 2000 people. I never have really understood the whole "township" thing up North.
Many counties in Florida run the Sheriff and fire department and citizens of the incorporated cities and towns will pay to the county for those services plus pay a little extra to be part of the city or town and get no real benefit from it. Those that live in the unincorporated areas get all the same services and pay less in taxes because they don't have to pay the city it's vig. Not all areas are the same.
And a city can be as small as 6-8 people maybe smaller.
Many of these divisions date back to colonial times. There is no national standard because different parts of the country were settled differently at different times. The federal government has no (or very little) control in this area to impose a uniform standard, unlike in other countries. The northeast is more incorporated because it has had a comparatively dense population for a long time.
Once local governments have power, they don't want to give it up. Where it really matters is with regard to suburban school districts. If a suburb happen to be its own municipality it has control over its schools, which is very useful in attracting affluent residents.
I imagine that at one time states expected, as the population grew, that all of their land would eventually be incorporated (like New England). However, as there are tax implications of being incorporated, there is resistance, particularly in the west and parts of the south.
Also, there has been so much sprawl in the last 50 years that the political haven’t had a chance to catch up. Many large suburbs were cornfields or desert only 15 years ago. They’re still trying to process all that change.
By the way, very unusual example is Hawaii. There are counties, yet many things are controlled at the state level, including schools, police and even public libraries.
One challenge in PA, and I am sure many other places is the very small municipalities and sorrounding townships dont always play nice nor do a good job with more comprehensive planning. Jersey overall seems better on this and in PA this can really impede smart and cohesive growth. Take the KOP area, it is really a bunch of small municipalities where the development has been mostly haphazzard, road, transit, planning and other infrastructure can all be adversly impacted by all the different little places that never talk to one another so we just get mindless development with little cohesion, this is where things at the county may be better in terms of more cohesive planning and zoning
there is map someone posted in another thread that visually shows this in the Philly, there is something like 350+ municpalities, some only 1 or 2 sq miles right in the middle of everything, need to try and dig it up
I know that in Michigan and Minnesota, areas that aren't part of cities are incorporated into townships, which are sort of like New England towns, but usually less organized (unless it's a Michigan charter township, which is very similar to a city). Southern states, as far as I know, don't have towns or townships. The Atlanta metro has some highly-populated areas that are totally unincorporated and use only county services, and I'm fairly sure it's the same in North Carolina. It's always seemed really inefficient to me, but that's just how they do it down there.
North Carolina
State-->County-->Township-->Municipality
Counties in NC provide minimal or no services - there's a sheriffs dept, volunteer fire, and that's about it. All but a handful of NC counties have consolidated countywide school districts, and the urban counties have consolidated police & fire. Counties are not authorized to provide trash collection (you need to be in a municipality, or arrange for your own pickup as no service districts exist here), street lights or any street/road maintainence (counties were allowed to build road networks in the early 20th century, and defaulted en masse on debts during the Great Depression, forcing the state to take them over, and the state has handled this ever since).
Townships still exist on paper, and are occasionally used from a data collection standpoint, but otherwise they are just lines on a map.
Municipalities (legally, there is no distinction between city, town, village, etc...it's all the same, and you can call yourself whatever you want) have a lot more weight in the eyes of the state than counties do, hence the longstanding annexation laws (which are undergoing a very major assault at the moment).
The state's view is this: cities do not have home rule in NC, and service districts do not exist, thus cities are entitled to grow and plan as needed - they need to define an extraterritorial jurisdiction (future growth area) and define some sort of plan for what kind of growth will be allowed there. If the state or federal governments provide any kind of subsidies to incorporated municipalities, then the fewer number of them (distinct individual municipal governments), the better, from an efficiency standpoint. Hence, the lack of home rule & service districts, and the legal inability to incorporate any new municipalities within 5 miles of the existing incorporated territory of a pre-existing municipality. Whether city or county, NC seems to have historically preferred having the smallest possible number of distinct sub-state governments within the state.
Basically, cities and the state call the shots here. The only limitation on cities is that the "strong mayor" form of government is also absent here, with cities having a council/manager government, and mayors are mostly ceremonial, with tie-breaking responsibilities. Thus, while cities have A LOT of leeway with things like annexation, the only get to exercise that leeway after arriving at a consensus within the city's government first, and if cities want to enact things like hotel taxes, land transfer taxes or local sales taxes (back to the lack of home rule), they can only do so after getting permission from the state legislature to do so, perhaps as a way of strongly encouraging fiscal efficiency in the cities (though the reality of this is highly debatable).
As an aside, there are strong moves afoot in the NC legislature to severely curtail the annexation laws here. I doubt the laws will be repealed, but I do expect they will go through some changes. There were always certain restrictions in those laws: cities with populations below 5,000 couldn't conduct involuntary annexations, cities with a history of voting irregularities before the passage of the voting rights act (most in the eastern 1/3 of the state) could only annex after gaining federal review and approval due to the potential effect upon pre-existing municipal demographics, and two cities (Fayetteville and Asheville) were blocked from annexations for quirky local reasons that were done away with in the 1970s (Asheville) and 1980s (Fayetteville). In anticipation that annexation laws may change, certain cities in the state (Raleigh, Cary and Greenville are the largest) have gone to voluntary/requested-only annexations, and the overwhelming majority of the growth in those cities since 1990 has been through voluntary/requested annexations or in-migration.
Every state I have lived in (South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington) is like the 2nd example. If you happen to live outside of the city limits, you are simply in a rural area, with no tie to any particular town/city.
Here in the Seattle area where I now live, there are actually some areas within the Seattle metro area that are not part of any city due to the way growth happened over the last 10-20 years. If you go just 5 minutes or so from my house you are in "unincorporated Snohomish County", even though you are close to the freeway, in a developed area between two suburbs that are growing towards each other.
You wouldn't think it would be a big deal, but as I found out with the new house I bought last year- it makes a big difference as to what zoning and inspection rules you have to abide by. Example 1 would seem to make a lot more sense!
The Atlanta metro has some highly-populated areas that are totally unincorporated and use only county services, and I'm fairly sure it's the same in North Carolina. It's always seemed really inefficient to me, but that's just how they do it down there.
It's not just "down there" where this happens. The suburban Maryland & Virginia Counties around the D.C. metro are exactly the same way.
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