Afterward, Mr. Guardian released a statement that said that a five-year recovery plan drawn up by the city “would have saved the state a substantial amount of money and would have allowed us to maintain complete local sovereignty.” He said the city would continue to work with the state but would “keep all of our options on the table.”

Other New Jersey cities, including Camden, have been placed under state supervision in the past, but the state has granted itself more authority to take direct control in Atlantic City, said Marc H. Pfeiffer, assistant director of the Bloustein Local Government Research Center at Rutgers University.

“This is a new process,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “We’ve never done a process like this before.”

In 2002, the state assigned a chief operating officer to help sort out Camden’s financial problems. One of the changes that ensued was the dissolution of the city’s police department and the transfer of authority to patrol Camden to the county police.

“Camden is effectively not on the critical list any more” and is in better shape than Trenton and Paterson, Mr. Pfeiffer said. “Atlantic City’s fiscal problems are far more critical that those of Trenton or Paterson.”

Atlantic City, which has around 39,000 residents, has sunk deep into debt as much of its lifeblood, the money that gamblers lose at its casinos, has been drained away by Pennsylvania and other neighboring states that have legalized gambling in recent years.