Nation's Cities - January 30, 2012

January 30, 2012
NATION’S CITIES WEEKLY 5
NLC Files Brief with Supreme Court to Limit
Retaliatory Arrest Claims

by Lars Etzkorn
Last week, NLC signed
onto an amicus curiae brief
filed by the State and Local
Legal Center (SLLC) in which
the U.S. Supreme Court will
decide if a First Amendment
retaliatory arrest claim can be
brought against a police offi-
cer, even though the officer
had probable cause to make an
arrest.

EMERGING ISSUES
FAQs re: Cities. 4 U & for all of us

by Bill Barnes

19,492.

If you responded to the number above
with “How many municipal govern-
ments were there in the United States
in 2007?” you could have won some
money on the TV show “Jeopardy.”
Bruce Calvin would be pleased.
Calvin is, among many other good
things, the manager of the “Cities 101”
pages at the NLC website where the
19,492 figure and other basic data about
the nation’s municipal governments are
gathered. Over the years, he has accu-
mulated facts in response to frequently
asked questions (FAQs), questions that
come to NLC and inexorably end up on
Calvin’s desk.

So, he created and has maintained the
Cities 101 resource. (At www.nlc.org,
under the “Skills and Networks” tab.)

Much of the data comes from the
U.S. Census Bureau. The Census of
Governments is done every five years.
It “identifies the scope and nature of
the nation’s state and local government
sector; provides authoritative benchmark
figures of public finance and public
employment; classifies local government
organizations, powers, and activities; and
measures federal, state and local fiscal
relationships.”
The 2007 data are online at www.
census.gov; no hard copy will be printed.
Unfortunately, the 2007 reports lack
some of the analytic and summary tables
that enhanced earlier reports.

The 2012 Census involves several
questionnaires that are going out from
The system of local government in the United
States is among the most complex in the world.

October 2011 to October 2012. (Cities
should respond so that the results are as
complete as possible.) The bureau says
it plans to engage potential data users
about dissemination plans.

Not “Just the facts, ma’am”

It turns out that Sergeant Joe Friday,
in the old TV series “Dragnet,” never
actually said that exact phrase, but you
get the idea. But “the facts” are not just
everything that’s lying around; we get
“facts” by asking questions and that’s
what the Census Bureau and Cities 101
do.
In “The Idea of History,” the phi-
losopher R.G. Collingwood explained
this relationship of “facts” to questions
by noting the difference between two
fictitious detectives: Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes and Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
Sherlock collects facts (like the source of
ash dropped from a cigar) as if the facts
themselves can add up to something.
Hercule makes “the little grey cells to
function”: he asks questions that elicit
“facts” and he develops theories that
make sense of the data. We do our best
thinking like Hercule, not like Sherlock
or Sergeant Friday. This is rather unfair
to the incomparable Holmes, but the dis-
tinction is practical, memorable and fun.
So, the Census of Governments’ data
allow and stimulate people to ask more
probing questions and develop more
useful theories, and the answers they
get stimulate even more questions. For
example, the large number of munici-
palities may prompt the question of
whether they are all the same (which,
of course, they are not.) That’s how we
get to know important stuff, expand our
common knowledge base and frame and
re-frame our assumptions.

The system of local government in
the United States is among the most
complex in the world. The 2007 Census
counted 39,044 general purpose local
governments, which includes counties,
municipalities and townships.
There are also 50,432 special purpose
local governments, including 37,381 spe-
cial districts, 13,726 independent school
districts and 1,452 dependent public
school systems.
The 19,492 municipal governments
are established by state law. They vary
widely according to quantity (Hawaii has
1; Illinois has 1,299), designation (they
may be called cities, towns, boroughs,
districts, plantations and villages), and
incorporation requirements (Florida, for
example, requires 1.5 persons per acre).

Bill Barnes, the director for emerg-
ing issues at NLC, can be contacted at
barnes@nlc.org. Previous monthly columns
are collected on the Emerging Issues web-
page at www.nlc.org.