Sit of the county

A seat of the county ( county seat in English) is a term mainly used with the the United States indicating the Ville which constitutes the administrative center of a Comté. In the North-East of the country, the legal denomination is often shire town , but conventionally, one uses rather the term of county seat . Some of the Seaboard provinces of the Canada also employ the denomination of shire town . In England, with the Wales and in Ireland, one uses the term county town .

Concept of county

The counties of the United States, just like those of England and the Canada, function like administrative divisions of a state and do not have any clean sovereign jurisdiction. The counties represent a decentralized element of the authority and have as a role to apply at the local level the law of the state or the province. In much of states of the United States, the authority of those is still decentralized through a division of the counties in townships (cantons). The latter provide at the local level the governmental services for the residents of the county who live neither in the cities nor in built-in cities.

A seat of the county east usually, but not always, a built-in municipality. The exceptions include, inter alia, the seats of the counties which do not have any municipality incorporated in their borders, such as the county of Arlington, in Virginia, and the counties of Baltimore and Howard in the Maryland (Ellicott City, seat of the county of Howard, is the largest seat of the not-built-in county of the United States, follow-up of Towson, the seat of the county of Baltimore). The administration and the court of the county are usually located in the seat, but some functions can also be led in other parts of the county, particularly if it is geographically vast.

Many seats of the county

The majority of the counties have one seat. However, some counties in Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, the Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York and with the Vermont have two seats, even more, typically geographically opposite. The County of Harrison, in the Mississippi, in is an example: it counts like seats the towns of Biloxi and Gulfport.
The installation of multiple seats of the county dates from time when displacements were long and difficult. Since, few efforts were done aiming at eliminating this multiplicity, this statute having become a source of pride for the concernées.
cities Vermont has shire towns , but no government of county strictly speaking, this one consisting only of one superior court and a sheriff (as a officer of the court ). Massachusetts removed a certain number of its counties and it is now the state which manages in these areas the registers of the charters and the offices of the shérif.
Two counties of the South Dakota - Shannon and Todd - have each one their governmental services based in a nearby county, services respectively provided by the counties of Fall River and Tripp.
The Connecticut and Rhode Island do not have the statute of administrative subdivision and thus do not have seat of county, their role is thus purely geographical.

The case of the independent cities

In Virginia, there are 39 independent cities (since 2001), which are legally distinct from the counties which surround them. An independent city interacts directly with the government of the the Commonwealth while the city, only another type of municipal governmental authority in Virginia, makes in the same way through the system of government of the county. In several of the counties of Virginia, the offices of the government of the county are located in the cities independent of the close counties. Moreover, for statistical processing, some independent cities are regarded as belonging to the county of which they are separate. For example, the town of Fairfax is separated from the county of Fairfax, the offices of the county being in the city, this one was statistically included in the county of Fairfax.

In the same way, the town of Baltimore, in the Maryland, is also an independent city, and just like Fairfax, surrounded by three sides by a county of the same name. However, unlike Fairfax, the town of Baltimore, officially named Baltimore City , is not connected politically or statistically with the county of Baltimore.
In addition to the town of Baltimore and the cities independent of Virginia, there are only two other independent cities in the United States: Saint-Louis in the Missouri, and Carson City in the Nevada.

As in Virginia, the Canadian province of the Ontario has 17 separated municipalities, which are municipalities which interact directly with the province without an intermediate county. Administratively and legally although separated from the county, several of these cities are used always as seat in the county which them entoure.
Ontario also has several municipalities of first rank , of which much is used as simple government of the county without lower or higher municipal governments. In this situation, the county is the effective local government in these areas, with a community of the county assigned with the seat, although it does not have any clean municipal government.

Appendices

Sources

Notes & references

Random links: