Minnesota has more townships than any other state, despite declines

On Tuesday night, thousands of residents in Minnesota’s 1,776 townships gathered for annual Township Day meetings, voting on tax levies and voicing concerns directly to township boards.

“There’s a lot of pride in belonging to a township,” said Minnesota Association of Townships Executive Director Jeff Krueger. “We are grassroots government. We are the oldest form of government in the United States.”

Minnesota has more townships that any state in the nation. Around 918,000 Minnesotans live in townships — that’s 16% of the population. But there has been a slight decline in the number of townships in recent years.

Krueger said it wasn’t long ago when Minnesota had over 1,800 townships. So where did they go?

It’s not often that townships apply to incorporate as a city, but there’s a trend of this happening to avoid annexation.

“I know other townships that are considering this because of the encroachment of the city, but they want to still operate as a township because that is what they like,” Krueger said. “They just want to keep the wolves at bay and just live the way that they want to live.”

Last year, Baldwin Township in Sherburne County became Minnesota’s newest city. Empire Township near Farmington is now the city of Empire as of 2023 and Credit River transitioned from township to city in 2021.

Townships become a city either by petition, signed by 100 residents, or a resolution from the town board. Then it goes before a chief administrative law judge at the Office of Administrative Hearings.

Records from the office show that there have been 34 incorporations from township to city since 1959. There have been four in the past decade. In the 1960s, 15 townships turned to cities, the heydays of incorporation.

The transition was 20 years in the making for Baldwin, said Mayor Jay Swanson, who was on the township board for 16 years and served as chair.

“Somebody called me Mr. Mayor, and I kind of looked around, and it’s like, ‘Hey, wait, that’s me,‘” Swanson said.

This is the first year Baldwin hasn’t participated in Township Day, falling on the second Tuesday in March.

That’s when residents vote for board of supervisors, elected to staggered three-year terms, and vote on tax levies.

Many townships are rural agriculture centers, but others exist in metro areas with big populations like White Bear Township with 12,000 residents and Baldwin, which was the third largest township in the state with 7,500 people.

“Township government, it’s the most grassroots form of government that is out there. It’s wonderful, but one of the questions for us was, is it the right form of government for 7,500 people?” Swanson said.

Baldwin is transforming from farm land to development with a business district and a growing commercial tax base. Swanson said the township put a lot of resources into this growth and didn’t want to risk losing it if neighboring Princeton annexed it.

“There is a definite fear of future annexation that could have happened,” he said.

Krueger said annexation has been a huge legislative priority for decades to stop the encroachment of cities, saying that forcing townships to become a city or be annexed “really goes against our freedoms.”

Townships were the original form of local government in Minnesota, established in the mid-1800s.

Krueger, who serves on his local township board of New Market in Scott County, said his township is looking at increasing its levy for road projects.

“I have heard from a lot of other townships that, yes, they are having to increase their levy, a lot of it because we don’t get adequate funding from the state to do the necessary things that we do,” he said.

Townships are not monoliths and needs vary in different corners of the state, especially for townships in rural vs. urban areas. But one of the biggest priorities across the board is transportation funding.

Townships manage and maintain 55,500 miles of road, Krueger said. Around 40% of all roads in Minnesota are under township control.

The state in 2023 gave townships $37 million for roads out of $230 million spent on all local roads and bridges.

Even with the previous budget surplus, Krueger said townships saw just a $2 million increase in road funding.

“Which is pennies per mile,” he said.

Jeff Hargarten of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.