Many residents of East Island pride themselves on the self-contained nature of their neighborhood. It's not really entirely self-continued, of course, and certainly not self-sufficient; it benefits from many municipal services, not least of which regular patrols by the city guard. Still, many East Islanders like to think of their home community as an island in more than the physical sense, and have constructed a pretense of self-administration. The East Island Governance Board is an elected group of twelve individuals who supposedly set local guidelines and policies. In reality, the directives of the Governance Board have no legal force and it has no way to enforce compliance, but enough of the residents support the Board to do the enforcement for them, if primarily through social pressure.

The members of the East Island Governance Board are not the most wealthy and powerful people in the neighborhood. The really famous and influential East Islanders have the power to just ignore the Board's edicts, which the Board in turn does its best to ignore. Generally, the Governance Board is made up of the relative "middle class" of the neighborhood (which is of course very much still upper class relative to the city as a whole): those rich and connected enough to campaign for and win seats on the Board, but not rich and connected enough to see the Governance Board as irrelevant to them.