Councils of governments and regional planning

Below the big federal commissions sits a much larger and older layer of regional bodies: several hundred councils of governments, regional planning commissions, development districts, and metropolitan planning organisations that quietly do the day-to-day work of planning across county and city lines. They are where “regional” governance is most concrete for most communities — and where the terminology gets most tangled.

Councils of governments (COGs)

A council of governments is a voluntary association of neighbouring local governments — counties, cities, towns — that band together to plan and sometimes deliver services at a regional scale. The idea took hold across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged by federal programs that asked for a regional review of local projects, and it has persisted because a lot of practical problems are simply bigger than one town.

A COG is typically governed by a board of elected officials drawn from its member governments, funded by a mix of member dues and grants, and staffed by professional planners. What it actually does varies enormously by region, but common functions include regional land-use and transportation planning, administering aging and human-services programs, coordinating emergency management and hazard mitigation, running group purchasing for members, and providing technical assistance to small local governments that cannot afford their own specialist staff.

Regional planning commissions and development districts

“Regional planning commission” and “regional development district” describe much the same kind of body from slightly different angles. A planning commission emphasises the land-use, transportation, and environmental planning side; a development district (the term the federal economic-development system tends to use) emphasises the economic side, preparing the regional strategy that lets local projects qualify for federal economic-development grants. In practice a single organisation often performs both roles, plus several others, under whichever name its state law happens to use.

Many of the multi-county units that deliver federal commission money on the ground are exactly these bodies. A federal commission may set the strategy and hold the appropriation, but the grant application, the local consultation, and the project management frequently run through a local development district that already knows its counties intimately.

Metropolitan planning organisations (MPOs)

MPOs are the one part of this landscape that national law makes mandatory. Any urbanised area with a population of 50,000 or more must have a metropolitan planning organisation to conduct a continuous, cooperative, and comprehensive transportation-planning process; without it, federal transportation dollars cannot be spent in the area. An MPO produces a long-range metropolitan transportation plan and a shorter-term transportation improvement program listing the specific projects to be funded, and its policy board blends local elected officials with state and regional transportation agencies.

Because the MPO boundary and a COG's boundary often overlap, it is common for the same organisation to serve as both — the regional council staffing the MPO for its metro core while also acting as the COG and development district for the wider area.

Why the names are interchangeable

There is no national rulebook forcing these bodies to use a single title. Each state wrote its own enabling legislation at a different time, and the result is a patchwork of labels that mean roughly the same thing:

Regional commission
Regional council
Council of governments (COG)
Regional planning commission
Area development district / regional development district
Planning district commission
Association of governments

Two organisations doing nearly identical work can carry entirely different names because they sit in different states — and a body called a “regional commission” at this level is usually a creature of state law and local membership, quite distinct from the large federal commissions described elsewhere on this site. When you encounter one of these names, the safest assumption is that it refers to a multi-jurisdiction planning-and-coordination body, and the specific powers depend entirely on the state statute and charter behind it.

The regional-council ecosystem

These bodies do not operate in isolation. They share methods, training, and advocacy through membership networks — most prominently the National Association of Regional Councils (NARC), a membership organisation that represents regional councils, councils of governments, and MPOs across the country, and its counterpart focused on economic-development districts. These networks publish good-practice guidance, run professional development, and speak for the regional layer in national policy debates. For someone trying to understand a specific local body, its state association of regional councils and these national networks are often the quickest route to plain descriptions of what the body does.