Handbook of Town Administration and Accounting for Town Offices (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART I TOWN ADMINISTRATION Towns A town is a municipal corporation comprising the inhabitants within its boundaries, and formed for the purpose of exercising such powers" and discharging such duties of local government and administration of public affairs as have been or may be conferred or imposed upon it by law. (Town Law, section 2.) Towns as municipal corporations are materially different in their powers from business corporations. Business corporations, unless restrained by their charters, possess the power to borrow money and issue securities therefor. Generally, they could not carry on their authorized and legitimate business without such power, and hence it must be presumed the Legislature intended that they should possess it; but towns and other municipal corporations are organized for governmental purposes and their powers are limited and defined by the statutes under which they are constituted. They possess only such powers as are expressly conferred or necessarily implied. (Wells v. Town of Salina, 119 K Y. 280.) They are corporations for certain special and limited purposes, or, to speak more accurately, they have a certain limited corporate capacity. They may purchase and hold lands within their own limits for the use of their inhabitants. They may, as corporations, make such contracts and hold such personal property as may be necessary to the exercise of their corporate or administrative powers; they may regulate and manage their corporate property, and as a necessary incident may sue and be sued where the assertion of their corporate rights or the enforcement against them of their corporate liabilities shall require such proceedings. (Lorillard v. Town of Monroe, 11 K Y. 392.) Towns, as they exist in this State, are all of statutory creation. They...