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:

    “Close to the academy in this town they have erected a sort of gallows for the pupils to practice on. I thought that they might as well hang at once all who need to go through such exercises in so new a country, where there is nothing to hinder their living an outdoor life. Better omit Blair, and take the air.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.”
    —Maya Angelou (b. 1928)

    “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)