Commonway
Version V. 2026.09.01

When Jurisdiction Doesn't Follow the Pattern

The How Road Changes Actually Happen chapter teaches a general method for finding out who has authority over a road and how that government processes a request. That method works for most readers most of the time. It does not work cleanly for everyone, because a small number of documented government structures depart from the ordinary city-county-state stack in ways the general method doesn't anticipate.

This page catalogs those structures. Each entry is a real, named, documented exception, not a hypothetical edge case. If your situation matches one of these, start here instead of the general method, since it will get you to the right authority faster.

This page does not cover private roads or homeowners' association jurisdiction. That topic is addressed directly in Question 2 of the How Road Changes Actually Happen chapter, since it's a routine branch of the general method rather than an exception to it.

#Consolidated city-county governments

Some cities and counties have merged into a single government. Consolidation is almost never total, though. Specific municipalities or functions are routinely carved out even after a formal merger.

Jacksonville and Duval County, Florida consolidated in 1968, but four municipalities (Baldwin, Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach, and Atlantic Beach) declined to join and remain fully independent cities inside the consolidated county today.1

Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana consolidated under Unigov in 1970, combining administration, planning and zoning, parks, and infrastructure development.2 Police, fire, and school districts were explicitly left out of that consolidation. Four municipalities were also excluded by a population threshold written into the enabling legislation, yet their residents still vote for the consolidated mayor and council and receive countywide services.3

Roads and infrastructure appear to be among the functions most likely to be pulled into a consolidation even when other functions stay separate, but this is a pattern, not a guarantee, and needs to be verified for each consolidated city individually.

#Independent cities

Virginia has 38 independent cities that are not part of any county at all. They are legal equals to counties, not subdivisions of them. Only three other independent cities exist anywhere else in the country: Baltimore, St. Louis, and Carson City.4

Virginia inverts the usual national pattern in a specific way: except for Arlington and Henrico counties, Virginia's counties do not maintain their own roads at all. The state DOT maintains secondary roads directly.5 Virginia's independent cities, by contrast, own and maintain their own roads and receive a fixed state funding allocation for it, while counties compete for a share of the state DOT's budget instead.

Virginia also has a distinct request category worth knowing about if you're dealing with an independent city: its Rural Addition Policy lets a resident petition to have a private or informally public road formally accepted into the state-maintained system, generally requiring at least 20 years of public use and 24-hour public availability.6 This is a different kind of request than fixing or adding something to a road the state already maintains. It's a request that the state take on the road at all.

#Dillon's Rule states

This variant is different in kind from the others on this page. It doesn't change which government has jurisdiction. It changes whether a government that clearly has jurisdiction is legally free to act on its own initiative.

Under Dillon's Rule, which originates from an 1868 court decision, a local government only has the powers explicitly granted to it by the state, plus powers necessarily or fairly implied from an express grant.7 A Dillon's Rule city or county that needs new authority to do something has to lobby the state legislature for it.

Home Rule flips that presumption: a local government can act unless the state has explicitly withdrawn that authority.8 Most states fall somewhere between the two, sometimes granting home rule only above a population threshold, which means two towns in the same state can have genuinely different authority to act on an identical request.

This matters directly for the How Road Changes Actually Happen chapter's Question 4 tracks. In a Dillon's Rule jurisdiction, a government telling you "we can't do that" may be legally accurate rather than simply unwilling, and the real next step is lobbying the state legislature, not applying more local pressure. Virginia, already covered above under independent cities, is a strict Dillon's Rule state.

#Tribal land overlaps

Tribal roads are maintained by a tribe's own transportation department or by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). This is not a variant of local government. It's a genuinely separate sovereign layer alongside federal, state, and local government. Tribes prepare their own five-year Tribal Transportation Improvement Program, submitted to the BIA for approval, running parallel to the state and MPO planning system rather than through it.9

Where a state highway crosses reservation land, authority can require joint approval from both governments, with neither able to act alone. In Washington State, for example, tribal authorities can adjust speed limits on a state highway within reservation boundaries, but the change isn't effective until the state DOT also approves it and signs are posted.10 If the road in question is a city or county road instead of a state highway, the tribal change additionally needs that local government's approval too.

#Special districts and metropolitan districts

In Colorado and some other states, roads inside a new development can be financed, and sometimes maintained, by a special district rather than the city or county a resident would normally assume is in charge. Colorado's metropolitan districts are genuine, independent units of local government under the state's Special District Act, with elected boards, property tax authority, and the power to issue bonds.11

These districts are often created by the developer before residents ever move in, specifically to work around state tax limitation laws that restrict how much a city or county can raise taxes for new infrastructure.12 A resident can end up paying off a 30-year infrastructure bond to a government entity they've never heard of, layered directly underneath the city or county they assumed owned the road. Colorado also has several narrower single-purpose variants of this same idea, with different governance models depending on the district type.

#Interstate compact authorities

A small number of roads and crossings are governed by an authority that belongs to two states jointly, created through a formal interstate compact rather than through either state's ordinary government structure. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is the clearest example: a joint corporate entity created by a 1921 interstate compact that required congressional consent, governed by twelve commissioners split evenly between the two states' governors.13

Its jurisdiction is defined geometrically, by a 25-mile radius from lower Manhattan, rather than by any political boundary, and it operates its own police department with authority to enforce motor vehicle law specifically at the bridges and tunnels it controls.14 A road authority like this exists entirely outside the normal city, county, and state stack, because it belongs to two states at once.

#States without a functioning county layer

A few states have no active county government at all, though they arrived there by different paths. Connecticut abolished county government entirely in 1960.15 Unlike Puerto Rico, which never had counties in the first place, Connecticut's county lines still appear on some maps and in some statutes, but there is no government behind them today. The state replaced counties administratively with regional planning councils and councils of governments, mainly for federal grant purposes.

In practice, this creates a direct town-versus-state road split at the level of individual streets. Some Connecticut towns publish street-by-street guides showing which segments are town-maintained and which are state-maintained.16 Connecticut also formalizes the split-by-function pattern seen elsewhere on this page: a state Office of State Traffic Administration holds authority over traffic control devices statewide, working through a locally designated Local Traffic Authority in each town, whose exact form (a board of selectmen, a police commission, a mayor, or a police chief) depends on that town's own structure.17

Connecticut additionally recognizes a distinct legal path from private to public road status: if an owner deliberately allows sustained public use over a significant period of time, a court can later find the road became public through this use, called implicit dedication, without any formal petition process ever having occurred.18

#Michigan-style road commissions

Michigan townships have no jurisdiction over roads at all, which runs counter to how townships function in most other states.19 Instead, Michigan created county road commissions: legally distinct, single-purpose government bodies that are not part of general county government, except in Wayne County, which uses its own department of public services instead.20

These commissions have jurisdiction over all roads in their county except state highways, hold no taxing authority of their own, and are funded entirely through state and federal road funds. Roughly three-quarters of Michigan's road mileage falls under county road commission jurisdiction, with the rest split between the state highway system and cities and villages.21 Road commissions also contract with the state DOT to maintain thousands of miles of state roads, meaning the entity responsible for the physical work and the entity that sets the design standard can be two different bodies even on a single stretch of state highway.

#Federal-agency-embedded roads

Some ordinary, daily-commute roads inside a city are managed by a federal land agency rather than the city's own transportation department. In Washington, D.C., the district's own transportation department manages most of the city's roads, but several major corridors, including Rock Creek Parkway, the George Washington Parkway, and the roads around the National Mall and Tidal Basin, are managed by the National Park Service instead.22 These are not confined to park land at the city's edge. They function as ordinary commuting routes threaded through the middle of the city.

The National Park Service also follows a distinct federal compliance pathway for traffic control devices, operating under a specific memorandum of understanding with the Federal Highway Administration rather than adopting the MUTCD directly.23 The Park Service's own sign system is deemed to be in substantial conformance with the MUTCD rather than a direct adoption of it. Major event closures in the district, such as a marathon or a presidential inauguration, typically require coordination across the district's own transportation department, the Metropolitan Police, the U.S. Park Police, and the Secret Service, since no single agency holds full authority over the affected corridors.

#Puerto Rico and territorial structure

Puerto Rico has no county layer at all. It is organized directly into 78 municipios, each functioning as a combined city and county.24 Its state-equivalent layer is itself split in two: the Department of Transportation and Public Works is the cabinet-level department, while actual highway construction and maintenance sits with a separate, semi-independent public corporation, the Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority, which functions as a child agency of the department rather than a division inside it.25

For federal-aid highway purposes, Puerto Rico is treated like a state, with its own Federal Highway Administration division office.26 That federal funding relationship holds even though Puerto Rico's basic governmental structure doesn't match the mainland county-city-state stack this page's other entries are built around.

Other US territories, including Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, were not individually researched for this page. Each likely has its own variant of a non-standard county layer paired with a federally recognized DOT-equivalent, broadly similar in kind to Puerto Rico's, but this has not been verified and should not be treated as confirmed.

#References

  1. Precedent-based Government of Jacksonville overview, including the four independent municipalities that declined 1968 consolidation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_Jacksonville(opens in new tab)
  2. Precedent-based Unigov overview (Indianapolis/Marion County consolidation scope). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unigov(opens in new tab)
  3. Legal / regulatory Indiana Code 36-3-1-7, excluded cities and included towns under Unigov. https://law.justia.com/codes/indiana/title-36/article-3/chapter-1/section-36-3-1-7/(opens in new tab)
  4. Precedent-based LegalClarity, overview of Virginia's independent cities (38 cities, count of 41 nationwide). https://legalclarity.org/virginia-independent-cities-what-they-are-and-how-they-work/(opens in new tab)
  5. Precedent-based Virginia Department of Transportation, contact and jurisdiction FAQ confirming the Arlington/Henrico exception. https://www.vdot.virginia.gov/contact/(opens in new tab)
  6. Precedent-based Virginia Department of Transportation, "How Roads Qualify for Improvements," Rural Addition Policy criteria. https://www.vdot.virginia.gov/projects/roads-qualify/(opens in new tab)
  7. Legal / regulatory Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, Wex definition of home rule, including Dillon's Rule origin. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/home_rule(opens in new tab)
  8. Legal / regulatory FiscalNote, overview of Dillon's Rule versus Home Rule. https://fiscalnote.com/blog/dillons-rule-vs-home-rule(opens in new tab)
  9. Legal / regulatory Bureau of Indian Affairs, Tribal Transportation Program overview. https://www.bia.gov/bia/ois/division-transportation/operations(opens in new tab)
  10. Legal / regulatory Washington State Legislature, bill report on tribal authority to adjust speed limits on state highways within reservation boundaries. https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2009-10/Htm/Bill%20Reports/Senate/5331%20SBR%20TRAN%2009.htm(opens in new tab)
  11. Legal / regulatory Colorado Special District Act, Title 32, Article 1, C.R.S. Summary via Colorado Division of Local Government: https://dlg.colorado.gov/special-districts-brief-review-for-residents(opens in new tab)
  12. Precedent-based Colorado Association of Homebuilders, metro districts explained (developer financing model, TABOR context). https://www.hbacolorado.com/colorado-metro-districts/(opens in new tab)
  13. Precedent-based Ballotpedia, New York-New Jersey Port Authority Compact of 1921. https://ballotpedia.org/New_York-New_Jersey_Port_Authority_Compact_of_1921(opens in new tab)
  14. Precedent-based Wikipedia, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department, jurisdiction at specific bridges and tunnels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Authority_of_New_York_and_New_Jersey_Police_Department(opens in new tab)
  15. Precedent-based Wikipedia, local government in Connecticut, county abolition history (1960 Public Act 152). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_government_in_Connecticut(opens in new tab)
  16. Precedent-based Town of Glastonbury, Connecticut, town-versus-state road guide. https://www.glastonburyct.gov/departments/department-directory-a-h/highway/streets-transportation/town-vs-state-roads(opens in new tab)
  17. Legal / regulatory Connecticut Department of Transportation, Local Traffic Authority role description. https://portal.ct.gov/dot/osta/local-traffic-authority(opens in new tab)
  18. Legal / regulatory Connecticut Office of Legislative Research, report on towns taking over roads within special taxing districts, including implicit dedication case law. https://www.cga.ct.gov/2002/rpt/2002-R-1015.htm(opens in new tab)
  19. Precedent-based Michigan Townships Association, "What Townships Do," explicit statement that townships lack road authority. https://michigantownships.org/about-townships/what-townships-do/(opens in new tab)
  20. Legal / regulatory Road Commission for Oakland County, jurisdiction breakdown and 1909 enabling law (Public Act 51), Wayne County exception. https://rcocweb.org/177/What-Is-the-Road-Commission(opens in new tab)
  21. Precedent-based Canton, Michigan, FAQ on statewide road ownership breakdown by percentage. https://www.cantonmi.gov/m/faq?cat=28#question-169(opens in new tab)
  22. Precedent-based District Department of Transportation, National Park Service traffic advisory reporting on Beach Drive/Rock Creek Parkway management. https://ddot.dc.gov/release/national-park-service-traffic-advisory-report-february-2(opens in new tab)
  23. Legal / regulatory Federal Highway Administration and National Park Service, memorandum of understanding on traffic control devices (UniGuide substantial conformance). https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/resources/policy/moutcd/index.htm(opens in new tab)
  24. Precedent-based Wikipedia, Puerto Rico Department of Transportation and Public Works, municipio structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico_Department_of_Transportation_and_Public_Works(opens in new tab)
  25. Precedent-based Wikipedia, Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority, child-agency relationship to DTOP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico_Highways_and_Transportation_Authority(opens in new tab)
  26. Legal / regulatory Federal Highway Administration, Puerto Rico/USVI Division office overview. https://highways.dot.gov/field-offices/puerto-rico(opens in new tab)

Suggest changes to this page (opens in new tab) Last updated September 1, 2026