This story is the first in a series of resource guides designed to help Door County understand its local governments. Click here for the series page.
Here’s a question: Let’s say you live on county Highway T, east of state Highway 57, in between Whitefish Dunes State Park and Glidden Drive. Which town government do you live within?
Valmy, you might say, or maybe Whitefish Bay if you’re closer to the lake. That’s what the area is generally known as. But Valmy and Whitefish Bay are both technically unincorporated places, not towns in themselves. So that’s not correct.
Well, your mailing address says Sturgeon Bay—maybe that’s it. The City of Sturgeon Bay? Still not correct, unfortunately. Your mailing address just indicates which post office your mail comes from, not which town you live in.
The correct answer is actually the Town of Sevastopol, a peninsula-wide geographic area that stretches from the City of Sturgeon Bay and the Town of Sturgeon Bay all the way to the towns of Egg Harbor and Jacksonport.
Towns, villages and cities—collectively known as municipalities, or municipal governments—are the most local form of government in Wisconsin. The municipality you live in determines who your elected representatives are at the most local level. It determines who provides some key services—road maintenance, firefighting and sometimes water or sewer, to name a few. And it determines, in part, what your property tax rates are, if you own land or a home.
The example above is just one instance of a pattern that’s fairly common across Door County: The places we know of as our homes, and our common reference points, don’t necessarily correspond to the actual entities of local government.
Places such as Maplewood, Little Sturgeon, Carlsville, Fish Creek and Ellison Bay are all unincorporated places—meaning they don’t have their own governments but are within the boundaries of larger towns. (Those towns are Forestville, Gardner, Egg Harbor, Gibraltar and Liberty Grove, respectively, if you’re curious.)
Mailing addresses add another layer of confusion. Because Door County is relatively rural, not every municipality has its own post office—meaning the post office where your mail comes from might not match the town you live in. Some residents of the Town of Jacksonport have Sturgeon Bay mailing addresses, for example, while others have Baileys Harbor addresses.
Door County also has several similarly named municipalities. It includes the village and town of Egg Harbor, the village and town of Forestville, and the city and town of Sturgeon Bay. These are all separate municipalities: Even though they share names, they do not overlap.
Door County has 19 municipalities in total: one city, four villages, and 14 towns. Over the next few months, Knock will publish a comprehensive guide to local government in Door County—including which local governments provide which services, and how local government budgets spend taxpayer dollars.
For more information on how to contact your local elected officials, attend meetings and make your voice heard, click here.
This story will explain more about what the differences are between different types of local government and what each type does.
The differences between cities, villages and towns
Wisconsin has three types of municipal governments: cities, villages and towns.
Cities and villages typically provide more services than towns, according to the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, which supports cities and villages throughout the state.
Cities and villages also have “home rule,” meaning “they possess more power to govern themselves in local matters without state government interference,” according to a guide published by the league. Cities and villages also can annex adjacent land to expand their boundaries, and they have more authority to create tax incremental finance districts, or TIFs.
Towns are typically more rural than cities and villages, according to Andrew T. Phillips (no relation to the author), a lawyer and the outside counsel for the Wisconsin Counties Association.
“When we think of city or village, we typically think of sewers, water, streets, sidewalks, curbs, gutters, things like that,” Phillips said. “Towns are a lot more rural in character, typically, and so they have town roads and large acreage, and primarily agriculture throughout the state.”
There are some exceptions, Phillips said; some towns are larger and more developed. In Door County, the Town of Gibraltar is one example of a town that does have a “downtown” area. (That area, Fish Creek, is an unincorporated place and does not have its own government.)
Wisconsin’s 1,250 towns represent about 95 percent of the state’s geography and about 30 percent of its population, according to the Wisconsin Towns Association.
In terms of governance, each type of municipality has its own elected body. Cities are led by a common council and either a mayor or a city manager; villages are led by a board of trustees and a village president; and towns are led by a town board and a town chair.
“(Towns are) a lot less formalized in terms of the governance structure, the organizational structure, and their authority,” Phillips said.
Town boards also are typically more hands-on in running the municipality, Phillips said, because towns typically do not have as much staff to handle day-to-day operations as do cities and villages. The Town of Gibraltar also is somewhat of an exception here, as it hired a town administrator in 2021.
One other difference is that cities and villages have their own zoning, whereas towns typically adopt county zoning. Five towns in Door County have their own zoning, however. The towns of Union, Egg Harbor, Nasewaupee, Brussels and Gardner adopt the DNR’s shoreland zoning model, which is centered around preserving the natural shoreland landscape.
In cases when residents of a town choose to form a village or city—a process called incorporating—zoning often is a primary reason, Phillips said.
What about unincorporated places?
An unincorporated place is an area within a town that is commonly understood as a community but that does not have its own government.
Unincorporated places can be as simple as a cluster of houses or businesses around an intersection.
There are hundreds of unincorporated places throughout Wisconsin. The state cartographer’s office collects data on them, and they sometimes are listed on vital records such as birth, death, marriage and divorce certificates. The U.S. Census Bureau even counts some as “census designated places.”
Generally, however, unincorporated places are not legally recognized as separate entities from the towns they are within.
What does the county government do?
County governments in Wisconsin are “the silent level of government,” Phillips said.
That’s because significant percentages of a county government’s budget typically are dedicated to services that most residents will have little to no interaction with: the Sheriff’s Office and the Health and Human Services Department.
That can lead residents to be confused about or unaware of what the county government does, Phillips said.
In Door County, in addition to the Sheriff’s Office and Health and Human Services, the county government has a wide variety of departments encompassing road maintenance, parks, soil and water conservation, the court system, zoning, transportation and the county museum. (A future installment of Knock’s guide to local government will go into more detail about the services provided by county and municipal governments in Door County.)
In terms of elected officials, Door County’s government is overseen by the 21 members of the Door County Board of Supervisors. Elections are held in April in even-numbered years; supervisors are elected to two-year terms.
Counties in Wisconsin can choose from three different leadership structures:
- County executives are elected by residents. They have the greatest powers among the three leadership structures. County executives function as sort of a county-level governor, Phillips said. The county board in these counties then functions as sort of a county-level legislature. Most counties that choose this model are highly populated, and Milwaukee County is required to have a county executive.
- County administrators are staff members of the county government, hired by the county board. Their powers are defined by state statute and include hiring, firing and supervising all department heads. Door County has a county administrator.
- County administrative coordinators are also staff members and are hired by the county board. But their powers are less defined by state statute and are more up to the county board of that particular county, Phillips said. Some counties with an administrative coordinator choose to give that person most of the powers a county administrator has. However, there are some areas where state statute restricts the powers of an administrative coordinator. For example, some county committees, such as the highway committee and the health and human services committee, have powers that cannot be given to the administrative coordinator. These include things such as approving the purchase of materials and acquiring land for highway purposes.
In recent years, a growing number of counties have chosen the county administrator over the county administrative coordinator model, Phillips said, due to the increasing complexity of local government.
“It used to be that administrative coordinator was the overwhelming form of government that counties chose,” Phillips said. “With the complexities associated with county government operations and the increase in complexities over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen a lot of counties move toward the administrator model.”