There are 19,429 municipal governments in the United States. For the purposes of the census, a “municipal government” refers to “political subdivisions within which a municipal corporation has been established to provide general local government for a specific population concentration in a defined area, and includes all active government units officially designated as cities, boroughs (except in Alaska), towns (except in Minnesota, New York, Wisconsin, and six New England states) and villages.” This count excludes places that are governmentally inactive.
CITY POPULATION DISTRIBUTION
- More than 174 million people live in areas with municipal governments
- 76 Million of those live in cities with a population of at least 100,000
- With the population of the U.S. in 2000 being 281,421, 906,
approximately 62 percent of the people live in a city.
The term ‘‘town or township governments’’ is applied here to 16,504 organized governments located in the following 20 states in the Northeast and the Midwest: Connecticut, New Hampshire, Illinois, New Jersey, Indiana, New York, Kansas, North Dakota, Maine, Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Rhode Island, Minnesota, South Dakot,a Missouri, Vermont, Nebraska, Wisconsin.
This category includes governmental units officially designated
as towns in the six New England states, New York,
and Wisconsin and some plantations in Maine and locations
in New Hampshire, as well as townships in other
areas. In Minnesota, the terms ‘‘town’’ and ‘‘township’’ are
used interchangeably with regard to township governments.
Although towns in the six New England states and
New York, and townships in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,
are legally termed municipal corporations, perform
municipal-type functions, and frequently serve densely
populated urban areas, they have no necessary relation to
concentration of population, and are thus counted for census
purposes as town or township governments.
Source:
2002 Census of Governments. Volume 1, Number 1, Government Organization . Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.
