[Magdalen] Counties and Cities

[Grace Cangialosi]

Hi, Arthur!
I know you're relatively new here, but I missed the fact that you're from Virginia. Where do you live? There are quite a few of us here who live in Virginia or who have lived here, and a few of us have become quite good face-to-face friends as well, by virtue of various listmeets.
I live in Ruckersville, in Greene County, which is about 15 miles north of Charlottesville. I moved to VA in 1981 and have lived in Alexandria, Page County in the Shenandoah Valley and Richmond.
Grace

On September 4, 2015, at 12:07 AM, Arthur Laurent <ALaurent at npr.org> wrote:

Hi. I live in Virginia. We have independent cities -- cities are not part of counties, though they could have been at one point. (What is now the City of Alexandria has been in Fairfax County, the District of Columbia, and even Arlington County for a short time. You have to know where to look to find land and church records...)

(Cities have more things they can tax-and can set the tax rate, to a maximum set by the State. They enjoy a separation from surrounding county or counties (they have their own sheriff, court, and so forth) There used to be a minimum population for a city in VA (60,000 maybe?). A city has to be exclusive within a border. (No towns within cities.) Cities pay for all public works installation and repair within their borders.

I live in an incorporated "town", which is part of a county --so I pay both town and county taxes. The town police have overlapping jurisdiction with the county sheriff (in patrol, not court and jail stuff, which is totally run by the county county. We have no Town Jail, nor Town Court.) The town pays to pave it's roads; Virginia pays to pave the county roads. Towns don't have to have a certain population, but in VIrginia, a town needs to have a continuous boundary. My town has a water and sewer system... Big hunks of our county do not.

Counties are independent, and can do almost anything they want within their jurisdiction. (There's a legal discussion ongoing as to which is "more powerful" -- not defined of course, or why would we need lawyers? -- the Commonwealth of Virginia or its counties... because counties are the legal descendants and modern executors of the Crown (English) powers of taxing, imprisonment, and so forth. I'll vote for the State to win that one,  no matter the history.)

Lastly, there are counties that act like cities. Arlington is a county, though it looks like a city to me. Their roads are repaired by VDOT, but they tax like a county.

Some taxes are reserved to cities, sad for Arlington...

More complicated than it really needs to be.

Arthur

Sent from my iPad

> On Sep 3, 2015, at 11:10 PM, Grace Cangialosi <gracecan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Well, Virginia is largely county-based, rather than city-based, which makes things interesting. So the Clerk of Court is generally the official at a county courthouse. If a town or city is incorporated and is large enough, it may have its own separate court and police department, but it isn't considered part of the county. If it's too small, it may contract with the county for those services. Very complicated.
>