List of municipalities in Rhode Island
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Rhode Island is a state located in the Northeastern United States. According to the 2020 United States Census, Rhode Island is the 8th least populous state with 1,097,379 inhabitants and the smallest by land area spanning 1,033.81 square miles (2,677.6 km2) of land.
It is divided into 39 municipalities, including 8 cities and 31 towns, grouped into 5 historical counties that have no municipal functions as the state has no county level of government. The entire area of the state is incorporated; all Rhode Island residents live within the borders of a city or town though some communities within towns and cities are census-designated places.
Municipalities in Rhode Island can incorporate as a town or city by a special act of the state legislature and there is no minimum population requirement. Eight municipalities were re-incorporated as cities operating under a charter, while the other 31 remain as towns which perform similar services. Since Rhode Island has no county level of government, cities and towns provide services commonly performed by county governments in other states. The state's cities and towns may adopt one of four forms of government: council–manager, mayor–council, town council–town meeting, or administrator–council. The primary difference between these forms of government is how the chief executive is selected. The Council–manager system involves an elected council who exercise overall control of the local government and a chief executive termed city or town manager who is generally appointed by and responsible to the council for the administration of local policies.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of municipalities in Rhode Island” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.