The Local Layer

by bam

The course about the level of government most adults were never taught: the city, the town, the county, and the tens of thousands of single-purpose special districts that tax people who cannot name them. It is course 5 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, already taught the four questions and introduced Dillon's Rule. This course develops that introduction into the real machinery of local power. You will learn Dillon's Rule and home rule as a spectrum rather than a slogan, and why state preemption can wipe out a local ordinance the week after it passes. You will learn the forms of municipal government, mayor-council (strong and weak), council-manager, and commission, and exactly what each one changes about who decides. You will meet the special districts that in the United States outnumber municipalities, learn why they exist and why almost nobody votes in their elections, and read a real one. You will see the New England town meeting, where the residents are the legislature, and then Unigov, where in 1969 the Indiana legislature redrew a major city overnight, by statute, with no referendum, the purest demonstration of the fact that in the United States a city is a creature of the state. It closes with a capstone: document every local government and special district over your own address, from the primary record. This course teaches how to READ authority. It is not legal advice.