Statutory city (Austria)

In Austrian politics, a statutory city (German: Stadt mit eigenem Statut or Statutarstadt) is a city that is vested, in addition to its purview as a municipality, with the powers and duties of a district administrative authority. The city administration thus functions as both a municipal government and a branch of the executive arm of the national government. As resident of a statutory city would, for example, contact a city office and interact with city employees to apply for a driver license or a passport.

As of 2014, there are 15 statutory cities. A few statutory cities are barely more than villages, but most are major regional population centers with residents numbering in the tens of thousands. The median statutory city has a population of about sixty thousand.

A statutory city is a city vested with both municipal and district administrative responsibility. A district that is a statutory city does not have a dedicated district administrative authority. Instead, town hall personnel also serves as district personnel; the mayor also discharges the powers and duties of a head of district commission. City management thus functions both as a regional government and a branch of the national government at the same time.

The constitution stipulates that a community with at least 20,000 residents can demand to be elevated to statutory city status by its respective province, unless the province can demonstrate this would jeopardize regional interests, or unless the national government objects. The last community to have invoked this right is Wels, a statutory city since 1964. As of 2014, ten other communities are eligible but not interested.

The statutory city of Vienna, a community with well over 1.7 million residents, is divided into 23 municipal districts (Gemeindebezirke). Despite the similar name and the comparable role they fill, municipal districts have a different legal basis than the kind of district that Vienna as a whole is. The statutory cities of Graz and Klagenfurt also have subdivisions referred to as "municipal districts," but these are merely neighborhood-size divisions of the city administration.

From the middle ages until the mid-eighteenth century, the Austrian Empire was an absolute monarchy with no written constitution and no modern concept of the rule of law. Regional administration had no overarching legal framework; customs were different from province to province. A first step towards a systematic footing was taking by Empress Maria Theresa, who in 1753 partitioned the country into districts (Kreise) ruled by district offices (Kreisämter) staffed by professional administrators and operating under empire-wide consistent rules. The scheme was unpopular at first and met with resistance. Most notably, it was never fully implemented in the Kingdom of Hungary.

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