The paper features the question of possible correlation of the notions of “state interest” and “publicinterest” as a common and comprehensive on the basis of the comparative legal method, as wellas the methods of synthesis and induction. In turn, state interest is postulated as an integral partof a wider interest. The analysis of the current Russian practice of economic relations between thestate and local authorities shows how the state compulsorily turns part of the public (in a broadsense) interest in the principle of targeted use of municipal property, including the availability of anexhaustive on-site inventory of property intended to address issues of local importance. However, assoon as this public interest changed — namely, the state agreed with the possibility of redistributionof powers between the municipal and regional (sub-entities of the Russian Federation) levels ofpublic authority, which, of course, often involves the redistribution of the object-matter compositionof municipal property related to it: the corresponding lists of property, that were rigidly assigned tomunicipalities, were excluded from federal legislation. The mechanisms of mutual relations of thestate and local authorities seems to be convincing evidence that the public interests of the state andlocal self-government are united, in fact, local self-government bodies today are the lowest level ofa unified system of state (or, with the consideration of the need for their formal separation, — public)power with common functions and tasks being solved both at the top (federal and regional) and atlower (municipal-territorial or municipal-settlement) levels. Moreover, despite the formal separation,the levels of local government and state power in terms of the forms and methods of exercisingpublic power do not differ at all. The considered practice, on the whole, leads to the conclusionthat as soon as a public interest is objected to by law (and the only subject of legal research is thisis an objectified interest in law, in other cases it is an object for studying other sciences: sociology,political science, and so on.) — it becomes common to the entire system of public authority and it isnecessary to find a balance of state-legal and municipal-legal interests on the basis of internal noncontradiction(combination).