I've already had a fairly lengthy conversation, some time ago, with stevea about the situation in New York, and I think we have a reasonable understanding.
Like the New England states, New York is divided into mutually exclusive counties, which are in turn divided into mutually exclusive municipalities. A notable exception is that the City of New York encompasses five counties (New York, Bronx, Richmond, Kings, Queens) which are usually identified as 'boroughs' (Confusingly enough, New York County is the Borough of Manhattan, Richmond County is the Borough of Staten Island, and Kings County is the Borough of Brooklyn.) The city has a unique admin_level. The boroughs are less independent than counties, since the legislative functions were merged into a single city council. The boroughs retain some vestiges of having their own executive branches (the Borough President, the chief executive of each borough, is largely, though a ceremonial post nowadays) and each borough has its own judiciary. Each borough is divided into community districts. The default municipality elsewhere is a town. This is what you get when you don't incorporate. Towns do not cross county lines. They are similar to townships in other states. Every resident in New York State resides in a town, a city, or on a Native American reservation. Incorporated communities include cities and villages. None of these cross county lines, except for the sui generis City of New York, and the City of Geneva, which is primarily in Ontario County but has annexed some land in the adjoining Seneca County. Cities are independent from the towns that spatially contain them. They operate entirely independently of the town, and generally have their own charters (constitutions). (Exception: The city of Sherrill has surrendered most of its independence and is treated as a village in the Town of Vernon.) Villages have more limited home rule. A handful are chartered, while most are governed by a uniform statewide Village Law. About 85% of them fall within a single town, while the remaining 15% are divided among two or more towns, which may or may not be in the same county. In all cases, the residents of a village are residents both of the village and of some town, and owe taxes to both. Below towns are also encountered hamlets. These have no independent existence or home rule at all. Their borders in some towns are fluid, with a cluster of houses or neighborhood being identified by a name. In other towns, the hamlets are coincident with planning districts or have special zoning, and are signed at their borders. Certainly, the towns that promulgate zoning regulations, parking regulations, planning policies, and so on by named hamlet deserve to have their hamlets' borders marked on the map, even if the hamlets have no home rule. Some hamlets are quite major places indeed. Brentwood has roughly 62000 inhabitants, and Levittown, 52000. Both would be Cities if they were to incorporate. Instead, Levittown is a hamlet of the Town of Hempstead (at 760000 inhabitants, New York's largest), and Brentwood of the Town of Islip. So to me, what makes sense for New York: admin level 2 - United States of America admin level 4 - New York State admin level 5 - New York City, special case admin level 6 - County, Borough (within New York City) admin level 7 - Town, City admin level 8 - Vlllage, hamlet (where borders defined), community district (New York City), City of Sherrill admin level controversial - Native American reservation; the official status of the First Nations as 'dependent nations' does not map well to OSM's admin_level structure. This scheme differs from what I see on the Wiki only in that the sixty-odd cities other than New York and Sherrill would be promoted from level 8 to level 7. New York also has a great many special-purpose units of government - school districts, supervisory school districts, fire districts and the subtly different fire protection districts, consolidated health districts, library districts, public benefit corporations, and parking, parks, police, sanitation, sewer and water districts in areas that have those services at a local level. None of these are constrained to follow any sort of county or municipal boundaries, and they are organized for the convenience of the agencies that provide the corresponding services. In most cases, they are not observable 'on the ground' (they exist only on paper maps and descriptions of boundaries, but are not signed or otherwise indicated separately), and they probably need not be mapped in OSM. There are some weird cases of towns that are too sparsely populated to support a functioning civil government. If memory serves, the town government of Arietta, for instance, consists of a supervisor, two council members, and a town justice, all of which are part-time positions, and the paid employees are a part-time prosecutor and a highway crew. (The town has just over three hundred souls - fewer than one person per square mile.) Several of these towns are located within the Adirondack and Catskill Parks, and depend on the Department of Envirionmental Conservation for many of the services that would ordinarily be provided by a town government. On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 9:56 PM, Greg Troxel <g...@lexort.com> wrote: > > In many new england states you list Town as 7 and City as 8. As a > local, this makes no sense to me. We have to keep separate what OSM > means by words and what various places mean; often they are different. > It's when they are close but not quite that it's extra hard! > > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > Talk-us@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us > _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
