In many countries of the world, this proliferation of governments would be intolerable, and cities would simply expand to annex their surrounding territories, or some sort of all-encompassing metropolitan government would be created. At a minimum, the small, suburban governments would be forced to consolidate into larger units. In the United States, however, citizens have resisted these efforts, and have been quite ingenious in finding ways to coordinate public services while maintaining the integrity of their local communities. In general, state constitutions and state laws provide for incorporated municipalities and unincorporated towns and townships as general-purpose local governments, counties as administrative subdivisions of the state, school districts, and over 33,000 other special districts that serve limited purposes which provide and coordinate services across jurisdictional lines without creating larger governmental units. Every state except Connecticut and Rhode Island is divided into counties.
Counties are subdivisions of the state itself.
They tend to cover large geographic territories and, because counties vary so much in size, state law typically divides them into categories based on population. Thus, there may be slight variations in the powers of county government that vary with population. Their principal functions are judicial administration, public safety and the organization of elections, although in recent years they have taken on a variety of new functions, such as solid waste disposal, public health, libraries, technical and community colleges and environmental protection. Townships were originally subdivisions of county government and were primarily responsible for road maintenance. Today, townships carry out a full range of governmental functions, such as police and fire protection, trash collection, zoning and land use, recreation and economic development.