I’ve never heard of a home rule-class city.
Just reading up on it now. Are there distinct advantages for the average home owner or renter to living in a city that makes use of these laws? I see they’re set state-by-state.
Thoughts?
I live in Missouri, where both my city and my county are home rule. State law sets up the exact form of governance cities and counties must follow. With home rule charters, any city or county can set up their government however they think best, subject to a different set of state laws. County governments, for example, state law sets up a board of three elected commissioners. It’s both a legislative and administrative position. With home rule, my county now has an executive officer and a number of county council members elected from districts within the county. A few years ago, it gave the sheriff the responsibility of dealing mostly with court issues and created a county police department to handle law enforcement. All these things are decided by popular vote. My city voted in its charter in the early 80s, and had tried it before sometime in the 60s, so this is not a new thing at all.
As a homeowner, any differences are pretty much invisible. But then I find little reason to interact with the government.
New York State has home rule, limited by state law in various ways, for cities, towns, villages, etc.
It allows individual municipalities to decide for themselves about certain things. Why should the state decide for everyone whether mowing lawns is required, or chickens should be allowed within the town limits? – sometimes the issues are more major. There was rather a commotion and a rush of new rules-setting when it was decided (in court) that whether to allow high-pressure horizontal hydrofracking was a home rule issue.
Home rule for municipalities has been the norm for a century, so you’d be unlikely to find many people who could make a valid comparison. Of course, the US also has urban areas that fit into a wide variety of governmental forms, from no municipality at all to villages or boroughs with limited home-rule authority to cities with full home-rule powers. Different states may class municipal corporations differently, meaning the words village or city may signify a form with legal significance in those states.
The 19th century common law rule was “Dillon’s rule,” that a municipality could not undertake anything the state legislature had not specifically authorized it to do. Home rule devolves authority to do things such as taxing and bonding, broad ordinance-making “police powers,” intergovernmental agreements, etc., to municipalities. The Wikipedia article explains the distinction and indicates the home-rule provisions for each state, but the practical differences are usually not noticeable to citizens. One I do remember: as late as the 1990s, perhaps even now, Texas did not authorize counties to have zoning ordinances.
Interestingly, we’re now seeing a retrocession of local authority in culture-war clashes between conservative legislatures and liberal city councils, with carveouts that forbid cities to raise the minimum wage, require masks, “defund the police,” liberalize bathroom policies—even to allow certain types of transit infrastructure. Other carveouts have come from industry lobbying: forbidding zoning restrictions on manufactured housing, for example, or forbidding municipally provided broadband.
Band name. Nah, frack that shit…
Euphemism name.
Speaking as an outsider, what amazes me is that cities in the USA can pass laws that send people to jail. If I understand the Canadian system, only the federal government can pass criminal laws, and the provinces are relegated to lesser crimes like traffic and hunting laws, with much less penalties. Cities are limited to bylaws, which I understand apply only to areas of municipal responsibility (building codes, speed limits, noise and animal control, etc.) and can only be enforced with fines. Generally school boards are empowered by the province, so the municipality has no involvement.
I’m not sure to what extend US municipalities can set and enforce their own laws, and what the appropriate penalties are. My general impression is that it’s close to a wild west scenario, depending on the state.
Canadian provinces are a lot more hands-on in controlling municipalities, even to the point of forcibly amalgamating them. (“Metro” Toronto was once a forced federal-like amalgamation of 13 boroughs, then 7, now 1) The heavy mix of multiple municipalities seems to be an oddity to me - including some very tiny “villages” embedded in the suburbs of giant cities. When we say “Chicago” or “Minneapolis” there are actually a dozen (dozens?) of surrounding municipalities that to the untrained visitor appear to be just one big city. To what extent does this “home rule” type arrangement limit the power of states to perform supervision or amalgamation of towns?
Interesting, I remember a fellow student in University. They guy was studying urban planning and mentioned that one Texan city had zero zoning bylaws, and yet in general land use seemed to sort itself out fairly logically. I had assumed this was a deliberate decision, but you’re suggesting it’s a byproduct of state law…?
I live in a home-rule city.
The advantage is that a home-rule city can set certain rules based on the local prevailing conditions, which may not be the same as the state-wide prevailing conditions. For instance, here in Colorado, the salaries of county commissioners are set by the state legislature, because counties are an administrative arm of the state. But Colorado Springs can set the salaries of its mayor and city council. The ability to set local rules can be a huge advantage.
Responding to several topics md-2000 raised:
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City ordinances that carry criminal penalties such as jail are relatively rare. Most violations of city ordinances are adjudicated as civil matters, meaning the standard of proof is “preponderance of the evidence,” that jury trials are not required, and that only monetary damages (fines) can be assessed. I see that the Illinois statute enabling city ordinances does permit jailing someone for no more than six months. In the US, the states are the ones that can make criminal laws. They can delegate some of that authority downward to counties and cities. And the federal government has now created some criminal offences itself, generally crimes against national security, regarding the mails, or severely affecting interstate commerce. Our Constitution does not give Congress the power to enact an ordinary criminal law such as forbidding homicide or arson.
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The forest of independent municipalities that make up American metro areas is indeed strange and stunning. Chicago has 274 suburbs, each with independent land-use authority; St. Louis has nearly 200, some only a few blocks in size. The reasons are a mix of racial and religious animosity, intolerance for alcohol, suspicion of big-city corruption, limits on municipal indebtedness, changing demands for municipal services, and politics. Lots of politics. We urban planners look admiringly at the forced merger of Toronto, or the schemes that allow metro government in London or Sydney. It’s not so much that “home rule” prevents amalgamation; it’s that suburban residents fiercely defend their independence. Attempts to create metropolitan governments in the 1970s had three hesitant sort-of successes (Indianapolis, Nashville, and Miami), but were fiercely resisted in Chicago and other cities as attempts to impose center-city problems (like poor black people) on the suburbs.
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Houston is indeed a sobering counterexample for American city planners, as—even without zoning—it looks little different from other US cities. In truth, that tells us more about how ineffectual zoning is in other places (against market forces) than how little it’s needed in Houston (which does have some other sorts of land-use controls).
I think the advantages/disadvantages are mostly either on a population level or on a very individual level - for example, when my city used to have a commuter tax* ( an income tax on non-residents who worked in the city ), the entire population of the city benefited from it but it most likely wasn’t noticeable to homeowners/renters. And when my city had a residency policy for most employees** , it would only have directly affected residents who either were or wanted to be employed by the city.
* It was eliminated by the state - which ironically taxes the income of non-residents who work in the state.
** It applied only to most employees, so that a clerk had to be a city resident, but a police officer or firefighter (and certain other jobs) didn’t . It wasn’t because the city chose to exempt those jobs, it was because the state wouldn’t allow the residency requirement for those jobs. Eventually, the city changed the policy so that most employees could move out of the state after two years of employment, but people could still be hired for the previously exempted jobs without ever being city residents.
Theoretically, towns (and I presume cities) in NYState can throw people in jail for violating zoning ordinances.
In practice, the process has to go through the courts, and IME is unlikely to get that far and probably even more unlikely to result in more action than a fine, if that; most likely what you’ll get is ‘no, you can’t open that business/put up that building/get a certificate of occupancy for that building you already put up’. (Which, at least theoretically, the town could also knock down again.)
Agreed. NY has different rules for what can be decided and how for towns, counties, villages, cities under a certain size, cities over that size (I don’t mean that every rule is different, but that some of them are.)
The City of Seattle has a robust Municipal Code and a court system with about 10 judges (I haven’t looked recently). All the crimes are misdemeanors, but they’re basically the same as the County code and State statutes. Assault, DUI, Theft, etc. There are jury trials (panel of 6 jurors). People can, and do, get jail sentences up to one year. You can appeal by right to the County Superior Court, and by petition higher than that. I assume this model was common in other big cities, but I can’t say for sure.
In theory, all of this could be handled by the King County court system. I don’t know why it was set up this way. Follow the money, I guess.
I once submitted a question to Cecil about this strange Canadian practice. Unfortunately, a few days later, Cecil called it quits on the whole column thing.
But after a forced amagamation, new suburbs will spring up around the outside, leaving the situation about the same as it was before, only bigger.
In Oregon, we avoid this by having a land-use boundary around every incorporated city or town or group thereof. Areas outside those boundaries are strictly zoned as farmland, so they can’t be developed as more suburbia.
I would say there are two things at play in Canada - the governments are parliamentary, and there was not as much racial animosity or urban decay.
When I was growing up, “Metro” Toronto was already a fact (I assume same idea as the boroughs in NYC). I remember a series of newspaper articles about the problems of smaller boroughs - union influence and corruption, for example, in Leaside. It was a tiny borough in the middle of the Metro area, and it and several others were eventually merged with larger neighbors. The idea that some place may a quarter mile square could have its own mayor and council, and run its own garbage and similar municipal services just did not seem efficient.
At the time there was no serious racial divide. “Foreign immigrants” meant people from places like Italy, Portugal, or Greece, not the third world. But the provincial government was parliamentary, and most of the ridings at the time were outside Toronto, and voted for the Conservatives. So the Conservatives, who had a headlock on control from all the farm vote, could do what they wanted with Toronto. So what if 1/4 of the seats, those in Toronto, went to the other party? If they could win the other 3/4 seats with a 55-45 vote over the Liberals, a 80-20 drubbing in Toronto did not matter.
Contrast this with a statewide governor’s election where the huge number of voters in the big city constitute an easy swing vote, versus being able to gerrymander a state legislature to maintain control. Plus in the USA the concept is the power comes from the people, and constitutions tend to reflect this - whereas in British parliamentary tradition, the government is exercising control on behalf of “the crown”; so less insistence historically on the “people’s rights”.
The American system seems to have a lot of redundancy - after all, if something is criminal enough to throw someone in jail, why isn’t it so in the whole state? I don’t recall ever voting for county officials - I understand they are an appointed administrative arm of the province, whereas Americans seem to have them as well as municipalities as additional layers of democratic administrivia below state and federal, with overlapping court systems, law enforcement, etc. .
Large portions of the population of Ontario no longer have anything like counties due to being amalgamated or split off into single-tier municipalities, but where they still exist (either as counties or “regional municipalities”) the councils seem to mostly be made up of elected officials from the component municipalities.
The key point is that in a parliamentary democracy, 2 party system, someone could achieve a majority with a theoretical maximum of 25% of the vote; the premier is usually the leader of the party with the most seats. Gerymandering could make this even more unbalanced. This is what happened quite often in the provinces, the divide between urban and rural until a few decades ago gave the Conservatives enough clout to disregard the views of the large cities. And like in the States, politicians in the one large city were seen as a political rival to the ruling party.
This is much the same as how a president can theoretically win the electoral college with significantly less that 50% of the votes cast,
Whereas a state governor is elected by total votes cast statewide, so alienating any group of the electorate is a calculated risk.
Grateful for the varied responses- and the Canadian educations to boot !! 