Cite as: 513 U. S. 30 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
to this one, in which we decided whether a bistate entity qualified for Eleventh Amendment immunity.12
Lake Country rejected a plea that the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), an agency created by compact to which California and Nevada were parties, acquired the immunity which the Eleventh Amendment accords to each one of TRPA's parent States. TRPA had argued that if the Amendment shields each State, then surely it must shield an entity "so important that it could not be created by [two] States without a special Act of Congress." Id., at 400. That "expansive reading," we said, was not warranted, for the Amendment specifies "the State" as the entity protected:
"By its terms, the protection afforded by [the Eleventh] Amendment is only available to 'one of the United States.' It is true, of course, that some agencies exercising state power have been permitted to invoke the Amendment in order to protect the state treasury from liability that would have had essentially the same practical consequences as a judgment against the State itself. But the Court has consistently refused to construe the Amendment to afford protection to political subdivisions such as counties and municipalities, even though such entities exercise a 'slice of state power.' " Id., at 400- 401 (footnotes omitted).
We then set out a general approach: We would presume the Compact Clause agency does not qualify for Eleventh Amendment immunity "[u]nless there is good reason to believe that the States structured the new agency to enable it to enjoy the special constitutional protection of the States
12 Petty v. Tennessee-Missouri Bridge Comm'n, 359 U. S. 275, 279, 281- 282 (1959), and Feeney, 495 U. S., at 308-309, also involved Eleventh Amendment pleas by bistate agencies; we upheld the exercise of federal-court jurisdiction in both cases on the ground that the asserted immunity from suit had been waived.
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