16Who actually runs a city

The short version: No single body runs a modern city's systems. The mayor's office may own the streets, but the water in the pipes, the trains under them, the power in the wires and the airport at the edge of town often belong to separate commissions, state authorities and private companies, each with its own board, budget and rules. Boston is a clear case: a city-chartered commission runs the local water pipes, a state authority supplies the water and treats the sewage for 61 communities, and other bodies run the rest. Knowing who owns what is the first step to getting anything fixed.

Why doesn't the city run everything?

When people say "the city" fixed a water main or raised the fare, they usually mean several different organizations. A typical large city in the US or Europe is a patchwork of four kinds of body:

• City departments, which answer directly to the mayor or city manager and are paid for out of the city's own budget.
• Independent authorities and commissions: public bodies created by law to run one system, such as water, transit or an airport, with their own board and budget, outside day-to-day city control.
• State or regional agencies, which run systems that cross city lines.
• Private utilities, usually regulated companies, which own and run networks like electricity and gas.

The split usually follows the shape of the network. A street belongs to one city. A reservoir, a sewage plant or a rail line serves dozens of cities at once, so the body that runs it tends to sit above any one of them. Money matters too: a body that can charge its own fees and borrow on its own account can plan pipes and tracks over decades without waiting on the city's annual budget fight.

The cost of this arrangement is coordination. A single block of street can have a city road surface, a commission's water main, a state authority's sewer connection and a private company's gas line, all under one patch of asphalt, each owned by a different organization with a different schedule.

How does London do it?

London is a useful contrast because it pulls much of its transport into one body. Transport for London (TfL) was created in 2000 under the Greater London Authority Act 1999.³³⁵ It is an executive body of the Greater London Authority, and its board is appointed and chaired by the elected Mayor of London.³³⁵ TfL runs:

• the Underground, the Overground and the DLR
• the bus network, mostly operated by private companies under contract
• the trams
• the "red route" network of strategic roads
• the congestion charge and taxi licensing³³⁵

So in London, one mayor-led body runs trains, buses, main roads and the congestion charge together, while the borough councils handle more local services. Even there, "public" does not mean "run by public employees" end to end: the buses that TfL plans are mostly driven by private operators on contract.³³⁵

TfL's money shows how tangled the funding lines get. In its 2019-20 budget of £10.3 billion, fares supplied 47%, grants (mainly from the Greater London Authority) 33%, congestion charging and other income 12%, and borrowing 8%.³³⁵ Direct operating funding from the national government ended in 2018, though the national government provided emergency support during COVID-19.³³⁵

Many other big cities split power in their own ways.

In the Paris region, transit is planned and paid for by Île-de-France Mobilités, a regional body that coordinates RATP, SNCF and nearly 90 private bus companies.³³⁶ Its 33-member board is led by the Île-de-France Region and chaired by Valérie Pécresse, the region's president since 2015, rather than by the Mayor of Paris.³³⁷ Paris's drinking water, by contrast, is a city service: Eau de Paris, a municipal utility created on January 1, 2010, runs the whole system, from production to billing.³³⁸ Tokyo's 23 special wards each have their own elected mayor and assembly, but the Tokyo Metropolitan Government runs water supply, sewage disposal and fire services across the ward area, while each ward handles waste disposal.³³⁹ The metropolitan government also runs one of the city's two subway systems, the Toei Subway, through its Bureau of Transportation.³⁴⁰ Of Tokyo's roughly 24,431 km of roads, the metropolitan government's Bureau of Construction administers about 2,347 km.³⁴¹

In Boston

Boston shows the patchwork clearly, because water alone involves two separate public bodies, neither of them a city department.

The Boston Water and Sewer Commission (BWSC) was created by an act of the Massachusetts legislature in 1977.⁴⁴ It is "a corporate separate and apart from the City of Boston" and sets its own water and sewer rates.⁴⁴ It runs about 1,015 miles (1,630 km) of water main and 1,435 miles (2,310 km) of sewer and storm drain pipe.⁴⁴

BWSC does not make its own water. It buys it wholesale from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), which delivers it into BWSC's system at 27 metered points.⁴⁴ The MWRA is a state authority that supplies wholesale water and sewage treatment to about 3.1 million people in 61 municipalities, plus more than 5,500 large industrial users.⁴⁵ Its water comes from the Quabbin Reservoir by way of the Wachusett Reservoir, and it treats sewage at Deer Island, at the mouth of Boston Harbor.⁴⁵ (The full trip is in Where your tap water comes from.)

So a glass of water in a Boston kitchen has passed through a state authority's reservoirs and aqueducts, crossed a meter into a city-chartered commission's mains, and will leave through that commission's sewers on its way to the state authority's treatment plant. The city government proper owns neither step.

Who runs what, as far as our sources confirm (as of October 2026):

On the streets themselves, the city's Public Improvement Commission owns and manages Boston's public and private rights-of-way.³⁵² Some of the busiest roads are state-run: as of 2021, DCR maintained Storrow Drive, Soldiers Field Road, Morrissey Boulevard and Day Boulevard, after a 2020 Baker administration proposal to transfer those four to MassDOT did not succeed.³⁵³

Who controls the money: mayor or council?

Boston is usually described as a strong-mayor city, and the budget fights of the past two years show what that looks like in practice. In the FY25 cycle, the council approved $15.3 million in budget changes, "only to have most of them vetoed by Wu."³⁴² In the FY26 cycle, the council's amendments came to $9.05 million, under 1% of the total, and passed unanimously on June 4, 2025.³⁴²

The FY27 budget was closer. In May 2026 the council "nearly rejected the proposal outright," and "the effort fell one vote short."³⁵⁴ The $1.7 billion schools budget passed 8-5.³⁵⁴ Mayor Michelle Wu accepted all but $1.4 million of the council's $11.8 million in amendments.³⁵⁴

Our reading: the council can push money around at the margins, a fraction of a percent of the total, and can threaten to block the whole budget, but the mayor sets the overall shape.

The rules come from the city charter. The mayor submits the budget by the second Wednesday in April.³⁵⁵ On November 2, 2021, 68% of Boston voters approved Ballot Question 1, which lets the council move money among existing or new line items as long as its total does not exceed the mayor's; the mayor can send the council's version back with further amendments, and the council can override those with a two-thirds vote.³⁵⁵

Cities elsewhere in the US often use a different model, in which an elected council hires a professional manager to run day-to-day operations. ICMA traces this form to Staunton, Virginia, which hired a "general manager" in 1908; Sumter, South Carolina, was the first city to formally adopt the plan, in 1912, and Dayton, Ohio, became the first sizable city to use it in 1914.³⁵⁶

According to the National League of Cities, council-manager is the most common form of city government in the US; in ICMA surveys its use grew from 48% of responding municipalities in 1996 to 55% in 2006.³⁵⁷ Mayor-council is the second most common and is found mostly in older, larger cities, such as New York and Houston, or in very small ones.³⁵⁷

How it changed

The patchwork in Boston was built in layers, mostly by the state legislature rather than by the city.

• 1977: the legislature creates BWSC as a body separate from the city, with power to set its own water and sewer rates.⁴⁴
• 1985: the MWRA is created, splitting off from the older Metropolitan District Commission.⁴⁵
• 2000: the MWRA finishes a deep-water sewage outfall from Deer Island as part of the Boston Harbor cleanup.⁴⁵

London went the other way at about the same time, gathering transport under one body: TfL was created in 2000 and placed under the new elected mayor.³³⁵

What's changing now (2026)

The pressure in 2026 is mostly about money, which shows up as tension between bodies. Boston's FY27 budget grew 2.1%, its lowest growth since FY10, and the city's release blames "the Commonwealth's rigid limitations on municipal revenue generation and diversification."³⁵⁸ In other words, the city says state law limits how it can raise money, which is another layer of the patchwork: the state runs agencies inside Boston and also sets the rules for how the city may tax. Who pays for the city covers that in detail.

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