Administrative Divisions of Connecticut - Town

Town

The 169 towns of Connecticut are the principal units of local government in the state and have full municipal powers including:

  • Corporate powers
  • Eminent domain
  • Ability to levy taxes
  • Public services (low cost housing, waste disposal, fire, police, ambulance, street lighting)
  • Public works (highways, sewers, cemeteries, parking lots, etc.)
  • Regulatory powers (building codes, traffic, animals, crime, public health)
  • Environmental protection
  • Economic development

Towns traditionally had the town meeting form of government, which is still used by some of the 169 towns. Under Connecticut's Home Rule Act, any town is permitted to adopt its own local charter and choose its own structure of government. The three basic structures of municipal government used in the state, with variations from place to place, are the selectman–town meeting, mayor–council, and manager–council.

Nineteen towns are also incorporated as cities, while one town (Naugatuck) is also incorporated as a borough.

The 20 consolidated borough-town and city-towns are classified by the Census Bureau as both minor civil divisions and incorporated places, while the other 149 towns are classified only as minor civil divisions. Some of the larger, urban towns are also classified in their entirety as Census designated places.

See also: List of towns in Connecticut

Read more about this topic:  Administrative Divisions Of Connecticut

Famous quotes containing the word town:

    “From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can you see how high its towers rise above the houses.”
    —Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    “There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)