Rutland Town

Encircling Rutland City on three sides, Rutland Town occupies the suburban and rural land around the urban core. When Rutland incorporated as a city in 1892, the outlying areas remained as the town — a pattern repeated in several Vermont communities including Barre, Newport, and St. Albans. About 4,150 people live in Rutland Town today.

The town's landscape ranges from commercial strips along the highways approaching the city to dairy farms and wooded hillsides on the periphery. Pine Hill Park, shared between the town and city, offers an extensive mountain biking and trail network that has become regionally popular. The town benefits from proximity to the city's services while maintaining its own identity and lower tax rate.

Rutland Town operates with a selectboard and town manager, holding its annual meeting separately from the city. The relationship between town and city — shared services, boundary disputes, competing tax bases — has been a recurring theme in local politics for over a century, making town meeting a particularly substantive exercise in self-governance.