United States Counties in U.S. states are administrative or political subdivision of the state in which their boundaries are drawn. In addition, the United States Census Bureau uses the term "county equivalent" to describe places that are comparable to counties, but called by different names. Today, 3,142 counties and county equivalents carve up the United States, ranging in number from 3 for Delaware to 254 for Texas. Forty-eight of the 50 U.S. states use the term "county", while Alaska and Louisiana use the terms "borough" and "parish", respectively, for analogous jurisdictions. A consolidated city-county such as Philadelphia and San Francisco is formed when a city and county merge into one unified jurisdiction. Conversely, an independent city like Baltimore and St. Louis legally belongs to no county, i.e. no county even nominally exists in those places compared to a consolidated city-county where a county does legally exist in some form. The District of Columbia, outside the jurisdiction of any state, is viewed by the U.S. Census Bureau as a single county equivalent. The specific governmental powers of counties vary widely between the states. They are generally the intermediate tier of state government, between the statewide tier and the immediately local government tier (typically a city, town/borough or village/township). Some of the governmental functions that a county may offer include judiciary, county prisons, land registration, enforcement of building codes, and federally mandated services programs. Depending on the individual state, counties or their equivalents may be administratively subdivided into townships, boroughs or boros, or towns (in the New England states, New York and Wisconsin). For independent cities and consolidated city-counties, those places report directly to the state. New York City is a special case where the city is made up of five boroughs, each of which is territorially coterminous with a county of New York State. In the context of city government, the boroughs are subdivisions of the city but are still called "county" where state function is involved, e.g., "New York County Courthouse". County governments in Rhode Island and Connecticut have been completely abolished but the entities remain for administrative and statistical purposes. Alaska's Unorganized Borough also has no county equivalent government, but the U.S. Census Bureau further divides it into statistical county equivalent subdivisions called census areas. The areas of each county also vary widely between the states. For example, the territorially medium-sized state of Pennsylvania has 67 counties delineated in