Cities, Towns and Who Runs Them

There are 234 cities and towns in New Hampshire, and Title III of the Revised Statutes governs all of them. The difference between a city and a town is not size, and not the word on the sign. In most places it is who the legislative body is — who adopts the budget and passes the ordinances.

In most towns, the legislative body is the voters themselves, assembled at town meeting. In a city it is an elected council, and so it is in a town whose charter replaced the meeting with a town council (RSA 49-D:3). Nearly everything else follows from that one difference.

Selectmen: the executive of a town. The statutes say selectmen (RSA 41:8); selectboard is the term in common use now for the same body. A town elects one selectman each year for a 3-year term, which makes a board of three (RSA 41:8). On the written application of 25 registered voters, or 2 percent of them, whichever is less and never fewer than 10, the question of increasing the board to 5 goes on the ballot (RSA 41:8-b).

The board's first job is to carry out what the meeting voted: it manages the town's day-to-day business between meetings (RSA 41:8) and puts together the warrant for the next one. It has some powers of its own — it may regulate the use of the town's highways, sidewalks and commons (RSA 41:11), and it manages the town's land and buildings unless the town has handed that to other officers or another statute governs it (RSA 41:11-a) — but the money it spends is the money the meeting appropriated.

Moderator: presides at the meeting, regulates its business, decides questions of order and declares every vote passed. The moderator may postpone a session for a weather warning, or for an emergency that makes the place unsafe (RSA 40:4).

A city has no town meeting. The powers the law vests in towns, or in the inhabitants of them, are exercised by the city council (RSA 47:1). The council may be called a city council or a board of aldermen; the name is the city's and the function is the same. How many members there are, and whether they are elected by ward or at large or both, is set by the city's charter.

Mayor: under the general law the mayor is the chief executive officer of the city (RSA 45:7), presides in the board of aldermen, and has a veto the aldermen can override only by two thirds of all the aldermen elected (RSA 45:9).

Council-manager: the other common arrangement, set out for charter cities at RSA 49-C. The charter names either the mayor or an appointed city manager as chief administrative officer, heading the administrative branch, supervising the city's administrative affairs and carrying out the policies the elected body enacts (RSA 49-C:16). The council appoints the manager for an indefinite term and fixes the salary, by a vote of at least a majority of the council, and the charter sets out how the manager may be removed (RSA 49-C:17). Where a city runs this way, the mayor chairs the council and the manager runs the administration.

A town may adopt the town manager form under RSA 37. It takes a vote: the chapter does not operate in a town until a majority of the voters present and voting at an annual meeting adopt it (RSA 37:11), and on the written application of 10 or more voters the selectmen must put the question in the warrant (RSA 37:12). Once adopted, the selectmen appoint the manager (RSA 37:2), who becomes the administrative head of all departments of the town and is responsible for administering them (RSA 37:5). The manager appoints and dismisses subordinate staff, examines the affairs of any department under the manager's control, and prepares the year's expenditure and revenue estimates (RSA 37:6). What the manager does not get are the things the meeting and the selectmen keep, among them warning town meetings, making bylaws, borrowing money, assessing or collecting taxes, granting licenses and laying out highways; nor does the manager supervise the town clerk or the town treasurer (RSA 37:5).

A town administrator is a different thing, and the difference matters when you are working out who decides. There is no statutory office of town administrator. The selectmen hire one to help them run the town's business, and the administrator works under their direct supervision. Adopting RSA 37 moves authority from the elected board to an appointed officer; hiring an administrator does not, and needs no vote of the meeting.

Village district: a smaller unit inside one or more towns, formed to provide one service or a few. On the petition of 10 or more voters domiciled in a village the selectmen fix the district's bounds, and the statute lists the purposes one may be formed for: fire protection, street lighting, water supply, sidewalks and drains, sewage, parks, police, roads and ambulance service among them (RSA 52:1). Once formed it is a body corporate and politic, with the same powers a town has in relation to the same objects (RSA 52:3).

A district holds its own meeting and has its own moderator, clerk, treasurer and commissioners, who have the same powers over the district's business as a town's moderator, clerk, treasurer and selectmen have over the town's (RSA 52:8). A village district may adopt the manager form too, but only once the town it lies in (or, if it spans towns, the one holding most of its taxable value) has adopted it, and it must then appoint that town's manager as its own (RSA 37:14). If you live in one, it is a separate line on your tax bill.

Some offices every town governed by selectmen elects by ballot: the selectmen themselves, the moderator, the supervisors of the checklist and the town clerk. The town treasurer and highway agents are elected the same way unless the town has provided for appointing them (RSA 669:15). A town whose charter gives the selectmen's powers to a town council has no selectmen, but it still elects its town clerk (RSA 41:16, 49-D:3).

Others a town elects only if it has voted to: the tax collector, town assessors, constables or police officers, the fire chief or firewards, and the elected members of a planning board, zoning board of adjustment, budget committee or conservation commission (RSA 669:17).

These two decide what may be built and where, and whether a particular property is let off a rule. In some towns you elect them and in others you do not, and which it is was a choice the town made.

A planning board has 5 or 7 members in most towns, 7 or 9 in a town with a council, and 9 in a city. In a town governed by a meeting, one selectman or administrative official of the town sits on it ex officio and the selectmen appoint the rest, unless the town meeting has voted that those members be elected; a town that has voted for election may later vote to go back (RSA 673:2).

A zoning board of adjustment has 5 members, either elected in the manner RSA 669 prescribes or appointed in the manner the local legislative body prescribes (RSA 673:3).

A school district is a body separate from the town, with its own meeting, its own budget and its own ballot. Its school board has 3, 5, 7 or 9 members as the district votes, and 3 if it has not voted, elected for three years with an equal number elected each year where that can be done (RSA 671:4). A cooperative school district covers more than one town, and its articles of agreement decide how its board is chosen. The statute allows several methods, among them electing all members at large, electing them from districts drawn by population, or electing them at large with at least one member living in each of the districts that formed it (RSA 195:19-a).

School administrative unit: the SAU, the administrative body serving one district or several together. Its board is made up of the school board members of the districts in it, each district's members sharing that district's votes (RSA 194-C:7). That board arranges superintendent services, sets the salaries of the administrative staff and apportions the cost among the member districts, and it has the power to remove the superintendent (RSA 194-C:5). This is why the superintendent answers to a board you did not vote for directly: you elected your district's school board, and your district's school board sits on the SAU board.

Charter: a municipality's own written constitution, adopted by its voters. Any incorporated town or city, whatever its population, may draw one up under RSA 49-B, the home rule chapter. A charter prepared under RSA 49-C establishes a city government; one prepared under RSA 49-D establishes a town government (RSA 49-B:2).

It starts with a question on the ballot. On the petition of 25 registered voters, or 2 percent of them, whichever is less and never fewer than 10, the voters are asked whether a charter commission shall be established (RSA 49-B:3). If they say yes, a commission of nine is elected (RSA 49-B:4), it reports, and the charter it writes goes back to the voters, where it takes effect only if three fifths of the ballots cast on the question favor it (RSA 49-B:6).

A charter already in force changes by one of two routes. A revision, which changes the form of government, goes through a charter commission of its own: the question of establishing one reaches the ballot by order of the municipal officers or on a petition of voters numbering at least 20 percent of the ballots cast at the last regular municipal election, and the revised charter too needs three fifths (RSA 49-B:4-d, 49-B:4-e, 49-B:6). Any other change is an amendment: the municipal officers, or a petition of voters numbering at least 15 percent of those ballots, put it on the ballot with no commission, and a majority adopts it (RSA 49-B:5, 49-B:6). A town may also repeal its charter and return to the form of government it had before, on a petition of its voters put to the ballot the same way as an amendment (RSA 49-B:12).

A town charter does not have to abolish the town meeting. RSA 49-D:3 sets out the forms a town charter may choose between: a town council; an official ballot town council; a budgetary town meeting, which keeps the meeting but limits it to the operating budget and bonds; an official ballot town meeting; and a representative town meeting, where members elected from districts vote in place of the whole electorate. A charter may also make a town manager the chief administrative officer, under the town council-town manager form (RSA 49-D:2).

This is why two towns of the same size, ten miles apart, can be run in entirely different ways, and why the offices on your ballot are not the offices on your neighbor's.

Every town and ward is listed here with the House and Senate districts that cover it, which is the route from where you live to the legislators who represent it.

Bills changing what towns and cities may do arrive in the record constantly. They are in the bill list with everything else, and a bill's page names the committee that heard it.

This site holds the state legislature's record and nothing municipal. There are no town or city budgets here, no warrants, no minutes of a selectboard or a council, no local ordinances and no municipal election results. Your town or city clerk keeps those. This page is here because bills about towns and cities arrive in the record every week, written as though you already knew all of this.

• Appeal your property tax assessment
• Get a public record
• Run for office

• New Hampshire Revised Statutes Annotatedgc.nh.gov
• Guidance for towns and cities (New Hampshire Municipal Association, a membership body)nhmunicipal.org
• Secretary of Statesos.nh.gov