As the Memphis & Shelby County Metropolitan Government Charter Commission discusses the ideal number of members that should sit on the legislative body of the proposed metropolitan government, I thought it would be interesting to study the size of city councils and county commissions around the country.

In this post, I’ll focus on city councils of the primary cities of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the nation; my next post will look at their county commissions.

The table below is ordered by metropolitan area, from largest in population to smallest (using 2009 estimates from the US Census Bureau).  Only the primary city for each metropolitan area is studied.  As is indicated in the far-right column, the percentage of the metropolitan population living in the primary city varies widely – from just 7% in Miami and Riverside (Calif.) to 65% in San Antonio.  Memphis is actually one of only four cities in this list where the majority of the metropolitan population lives within the city limits of the primary city.

The population for each city and the number of members on its legislative body (which I will hereafter uniformly refer to as “city council,” regardless of its actual name) are indicated to determine the ratio of resident-per-council seat.  Not surprisingly, the largest city councils in the country are in two of the three largest cites: New York and Chicago, with 51 and 50 members, respectively.  But the ratios range from one council person for every 255,000 residents in Los Angeles to one for every 11,000 in Providence.  At about one council person per 51,000 residents, Memphis is close to the average for these cities, which is one per 65,000.

No two city councils in these cities are alike.  For example, in some cities, the mayor is actually a member of the legislative body and not the chief of a separate executive branch.  For these cities, I did not include the mayor in the calculation of council members to allow for a clearer comparison.

Some cities still employ the city commission form of government; Portland elects four commissioners to act as heads of various municipal departments.  Some cities have at-large seats.  For example, New Orleans elects five council people from districts and its council president and vice-president at-large.  All of the council seats in Detroit and Seattle are at-large, although Detroit recently voted to end this practice in 2013 and a similar movement is afoot in Seattle.  Memphis has a unique take on at-large districts, electing six of its thirteen council members from two “super-districts.”  Kansas City has a somewhat similar approach: it elects two members from each of its six large districts.  Perhaps the most unique of all city councils was the one in Seattle from 1890-1896, where there was a bicameral council made up of a lower House of Delegates and an upper Board of Aldermen!

Cities with consolidated city-county forms of government typically have very large councils.  This is the result of the combination of two legislative bodies into one.  My next post will look at the size of the 50 primary cities’ county bodies, if one exists.

2009 Council Ratio At-large Metro pop
City city pop seats pop/seat seats in city
1 New York 8,363,710 51 163,994 0 44%
2 Los Angeles 3,833,995 15 255,600 0 30%
3 Chicago 2,853,114 50 57,062 0 30%
4 Dallas 1,279,910 14 91,422 0 20%
5 Philadelphia 1,547,297 17 91,017 7 26%
6 Houston 2,242,193 14 160,157 5 38%
7 Miami 413,201 5 82,640 0 7%
8 Washington, DC 591,833 13 45,526 5 11%
9 Atlanta 537,958 15 35,864 3 10%
10 Boston 609,023 13 46,848 4 13%
11 Detroit 912,062 9 101,340 all 21%
12 Phoenix 1,567,924 8 195,991 0 36%
13 San Francisco 815,358 11 74,123 0 19%
14 Riverside 293,761 7 41,966 0 7%
15 Seattle 598,541 9 66,505 all 18%
16 Minneapolis 382,605 13 29,431 0 12%
17 San Diego 1,279,329 8 159,916 0 42%
18 St. Louis city 354,361 28 12,656 0 13%
19 Tampa 332,888 7 47,555 3 12%
20 Baltimore 636,919 15 42,461 1 24%
21 Denver 598,707 13 46,054 2 23%
22 Pittsburgh 312,819 9 34,758 0 13%
23 Portland 557,706 4 139,427 all 25%
24 Cincinnati 332,252 9 36,917 all 15%
25 Sacramento 463,794 8 57,974 0 22%
26 Cleveland 433,748 21 20,655 0 21%
27 Orlando 220,186 6 36,698 0 11%
28 San Antonio 1,351,305 10 135,131 0 65%
29 Kansas City 451,572 12 37,631 0 22%
30 Las Vegas 558,383 6 93,064 0 29%
31 San Jose 948,279 10 94,828 0 52%
32 Columbus 754,885 7 107,841 all 42%
33 Charlotte 687,456 11 62,496 4 39%
34 Indianapolis 798,382 29 27,530 4 46%
35 Austin 757,688 6 126,281 all 44%
36 Virginia Beach 433,746 10 43,375 3 26%
37 Providence 175,255 15 11,684 0 11%
38 Nashville-Davidson 596,462 41 14,548 6 38%
39 Milwaukee 604,477 15 40,298 0 39%
40 Jacksonville 807,815 19 42,517 5 61%
41 Memphis 669,651 13 51,512 0 51%
42 Louisville-Jefferson 557,224 26 21,432 0 44%
43 Richmond 192,913 9 21,435 0 16%
44 Oklahoma City 551,789 8 68,974 0 45%
45 Hartford 124,512 9 13,835 all 10%
46 New Orleans 223,388 7 31,913 2 19%
47 Birmingham 229,424 9 25,492 0 20%
48 Salt Lake City 178,858 7 25,551 0 16%
49 Raleigh 392,552 7 56,079 2 35%
50 Buffalo 276,059 9 30,673 0 25%