What's your local government?

[SoxFan]

Having served i local government in both an elected and appointed post, I'm curious about what other folks have for their local government.

Manchester, NH, where I live, has a strong mayor and a 14 member Board of Aldermen, the city council. There's also a county commission, but county government is very weak under NH law.

[guitar man]

1. Rural/unincorporated

Creek County Oklahoma.

[Brickbat]

2. Township board.

[femmocrat]

3. Three guys in flannel shirts who repair the roads and scrape the snow.

Seriously. They are our township supervisors and double as the roads crew. And they do a damn fine job!

[SoxFan]

12. Larry, his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl!

[flvegan]

4. Other: Morons.

City of Tampa has a mayor and city council. The county has a BOCC. 90% of them are questionable as humans.

[Kat45]

5. Town Manager/Town Council n/t

[LeftyMom]

6. Soul-less tract house developers who write the checks and run everything. It's no secret.

If the tract house mafia told the Board of Supervisors to eat their shit in public, the Supes fight over who got to award themselves the biggest piece, and then send glossy mailers to my house bragging about their fine new partnership with local developers to meet their district's food needs.

So if you need to know who to bribe in the greater Sacramento area: Sacramento proper (which has a small percentage of the local population) has a mayor, who is an ex-jock and about as bright as a bag of hammers, and a city council who mostly worry about serving their own neighborhoods and constituencies. Sacramento County (which used to have the bulk of the population, but a lot of smaller cities have split off) has a Board of Supervisors. The smaller, newer cities mostly contract with the county for services. Elk Grove's is the most obviously corrupt, the others have less new development and less money changing hands, but they try to keep up. They're all fairly inept from what I can tell. Since the newish cities in the formerly unincorporated areas almost all contract for policing, the local politician with the most practical power is arguably the county sheriff.

[SoxFan]

11. It's the commercial property developers here

Two in particular, one of whom is the cousin if the mayor. These guys come in and make $10,000 campaign donations and expect everything to be handed to them.

One development company has been throwing a hissy fit for months since they lost out on redeveloping a dilapidated textile mill. The guy behind Segway, Dean Kamen (who doesn't make campaign contributions), presented a better proposal, particularly in terms of preserving the historic character of the building, but the other company believed that they should be handed it by some form of divine right. They were so obnoxious about it that it probably cost them votes in the end.

[taterguy]

7. Autonomous collective

[jobycom]

8. We got everything. Mayor, manager, council, county supervisors

And something called a judge that is like a county super-supervisor. Technically, the country and the city government are seperate, but the county is almost all city. Plus we have an Independent School Board, a community college board, and I don't even know what else.

And they just cancelled Christmas, so even though they are Democrats, I want to see them all lose. Grinches and Scrooges.

[Richardo]

9. Gay woman mayor

It's all going to hell around here, what with the agenda and the toasters and the incessant house-techno music. :D

[NoPasaran]

10. Seven clowns and a city manager