Opinion ID: 2631894
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the court has applied the wrong standard in construing state law to allow mayoral vetoes of school budget ordinances.

Text: The court compounds these errors by applying the wrong standard to determine whether a home rule mayor's school-budget veto impermissibly conflicts with the requirements of state law. In selecting the applicable standard, the court assigns predominate weight to the Alaska Constitution's home rule clause, which gives home rule municipalities all legislative powers not prohibited by law or by charter. [30] Relying on this constitutional language, the court declares that, [i]n deciding whether the state has limited the powers of home rule municipalities, we first look for prohibitions, not grants of power. [31] While recognizing that state law can sometimes restrict a home rule municipality's power implicitly, the court reasons that an implied restriction can only occur when a `statute and ordinance are so substantially irreconcilable that one cannot be given its substantive effect if the other is to be accorded the weight of law.' [32] This standard leads the court to uphold the municipality's position because, in the court's view, a mayoral veto over the school budget does not irreconcilably impede the purpose of Title 14. [33] But the court has fashioned a constitutionally lopsided standard: while heeding the municipality's call to honor the constitution's broad grant of home rule power, this standard all but ignores Repasky's equally compelling call to enforce constitutional language granting the state exclusive control over public education. As already discussed, the Alaska Constitution's public education clause expressly provides that [t]he legislature shall by general law establish and maintain a system of public schools open to all children of the State. [34] Our cases hold that [t]his constitutional mandate for pervasive state authority in the field of education could not be more clear. [35] We have emphasized that the public education clause is mandatory, not permissive; and we have declared this provision to be unqualified in specifying that no other unit of government shares responsibility or authority. [36] For these reasons we have sternly warned against inferring a surrender of the state's constitutional prerogatives from any law that transfers limited educational powers to local government: That the legislature has seen fit to delegate certain educational functions to local school boards in order that Alaska schools might be adapted to meet the varying conditions of different localities does not diminish this constitutionally mandated state control over education. [37] In the case before us, then, when we gauge how broadly to apply AS 14.14.060(c)'s delegation of power to the assembly, we must use a standard that acknowledges the tensions between two competing constitutional mandates: article VII's public education clause and article X's home rule clause. Yet by holding that the mayoral veto must survive unless it irreconcilably impede[s] the purposes of Title 14, the court inexplicably emphasizes only one of these mandatesthe home rule clause. [38] The court's standard might serve well when used to resolve conflicts between municipal home rule powers and ordinary statutes. But we have never used it to decide the validity of home rule actions that conflict with state laws rooted in the public education clause. To the contrary, our cases involving educational functions articulated a standard that would allow us to interpret a statute like AS 14.14.060(c) as an implicit delegation of power only if the delegated power would affirmatively promote the state's educational purposes. Beginning in Chugach Electric Ass'n v. City of Anchorage, [39] we adopted a local activity rule as an expedient method to apply when home rule ordinances either directly or collaterally impede ... implementation of policies expressed in state laws. [40] A year later, in Macauley v. Hildebrand , [41] we considered a case involving a conflict between a home rule charter provision that required a school district to use the borough accounting system and a statute that allowed centralized accounting only if the school board consented. [42] Reviewing the test that we adopted in Chugach Electric, we noted that the determination of whether a home rule municipality can enforce an ordinance which conflicts with a state statute hinged on whether the matter regulated is of statewide or local concern. [43] Applying this formulation, we struck the charter provision, ruling that [t]he outcome of the local activity test in the case at bar is dictated by Article VII, Section 1 of the Alaska Constitution [the public education clause]. [44] We next dealt with conflicting state and home rule provisions in Jefferson v. State . [45] There, we backed away from Chugach Electric 's local activity rule. Using the constitution's home rule clause as the appropriate starting point for analysis, we enunciated for the first time a test based on the notion of substantial irreconcilability: The test we derive from Alaska's constitutional provisions is one of prohibition, rather than traditional tests such as statewide versus local concern. A municipal ordinance is not necessarily invalid in Alaska because it is inconsistent or in conflict with a state statute. The question rests on whether the exercise of authority has been prohibited to municipalities. The prohibition must be either by express terms or by implication such as where the statute and ordinance are so substantially irreconcilable that one cannot be given its substantive effect if the other is to be accorded the weight of law. [46] The Jefferson test resembles the standard that the court applies here, and that test undeniably gives preference to municipal laws having close ties to the home rule clause. But Jefferson qualified its endorsement of the substantial irreconcilability test, declaring that this standard must give way when, as here, a home rule power butts against the mandate of the Alaska Constitution's public education clause. The public education clause was not directly at issue in Jefferson. The conflict there arose between a city charter provision governing disposition of public utility assets and a state law precluding a city located within an organized borough from disposing of such assets after the borough exercised areawide power over the subject. [47] Applying the substantially irreconcilable test, Jefferson resolved this conflict in favor of the state, finding the city's action to be irreconcilable with the state statute because the statute's prohibition [was] express. [48] But Jefferson did not stop its analysis there. It proceeded to examine its newly adopted standard in light of this court's earlier case law, emphasizing that [o]ur decision ... is in accord with this court's opinions relating to cases of conflict between local ordinances and state enactments. [49] Jefferson 's discussion of Macauley v. Hildebrand is especially germane to the present controversy because the conflict in Macauley involved a statutory delegation of educational power implicating the public education clause in much the same way that AS 14.14.060(c) implicates the clause here. In discussing Macauley, Jefferson expressly recognized that conflicts like these present exceptional circumstances in which the home rule clause must ordinarily yield: The statute involved in Macauley was an express delegation by the state legislature to municipal corporations of a constitutionally mandated legislative power. We reasoned that the language of the state constitution mandating maintenance of a school system by the state vested the legislature with pervasive control over public education. Thus, home rule municipalities were precluded from exercising power over education unless, and to the extent, delegated by the state legislature; and the local ordinance was therefore overridden by the statute. [50] Jefferson 's public education test, then, is the obverse of the test that the court espouses here: to invalidate a municipal action, the test looks not for an express prohibition or irreconcilable conflict, but merely for the absence of a specific delegation. Under the test that Jefferson articulates for public education clause cases, then, state law has the preference; it prevails in the absence of express delegation: [H]ome rule municipalities [are] precluded from exercising power over education except when that power is delegated by the state legislature. [51] Our most recent decision addressing a home rule city's exercise of delegated public education power, Tunley v. Municipality of Anchorage School District, [52] refines Jefferson 's public education clause test by describing the circumstances in which an implied delegation of power may be found. Tunley considered the scope of AS 14.14.060(d)'s provision vesting municipal assemblies with authority to determine the location of school buildings. [53] The Anchorage School Board was sued because it closed two schools without assembly approval. [54] In rejecting a challenge to the board's unapproved action, we declined to read subsection.060(d)'s delegation to the assembly of power to determine location as carrying with it an implied power over closure. [55] We explained our narrow interpretation of subsection.060(d) by noting that, although the provision's express delegation of approval power over location was consistent with the overall purpose of AS 14.14.060, [t]his statutory consistency is not furthered by ... assembly power to determine which schools are to discontinue operations. Tunley thus enforced section .060's express delegation of the power to locate but suggested that the section could not be interpreted to extend an implied or inherent delegation of the power to close unless that power was necessary to promote consistency with the section's underlying educational purpose. Applying these principles here dictates the conclusion that AS 14.14.060(c)'s express delegation of approval power only to the assembly cannot be construed to imply a broader delegation of veto power to the mayor. For a veto power of that kind would do nothing to promote consistency with AS 14.14.060's basic goal. As the court itself acknowledges, the veto power adds a new wrinkle to the school budget processan extra political element that was not previously there. [56] Although this extra wrinkle undeniably serves local political interests by enhancing mayoral control over the school budget, it adds nothing of benefit to the statutorily established school budget process: the added political wrinkle is neither necessary nor helpful to promote consistency with any of AS 14.14.060(c)'s educational purposesthe only purposes properly at issue here. Indeed, as we have seen, one of subsection .060(c)'s most prominent goals is to keep the school-budget process wrinkle free. At best, then, this new political element might prove to be a minor inconvenience to the school budget process. And at worst, of course, the veto power might prove to be far more than a mere wrinkle or minor hindrance. While local school districts are in one sense a part of municipal government, in another sense their constitutional and statutory sense-they are independent state institutions that work locally with municipal government. [57] And as this court has previously emphasized, [n]owhere is the independent status of the Anchorage School Board more apparent than in school system budgetary matters. [58] The statutory delegation of power at issue here, AS 14.14.060(c), attempts to strike a careful balance between the state's vital constitutional interest in maintaining pervasive authority over public education and the legitimate local interest in ensuring that Alaska schools might be adapted to meet the varying conditions of different localities [in a way that] does not diminish this constitutionally mandated state control over education. [59] By extending subsection .060(c)'s reach beyond the statute's express delegation to the assembly and nudging school-budget approval power within the city executive's sphere of control, the court unavoidably dilutes the school district's independence. The court's action tilts the original balance of powers decidedly away from pervasive state authority and school district autonomy. It distorts, rather than promotes, subsection .060(c)'s educational goal. Apart from causing this kind of institutional distortion, shifting the balance of state and municipal power will also unleash anomalous procedural consequences. Whether the mayor plays any role in the school-budget approval process will become an arbitrary exercise in assembly timing: the assembly can choose to leave the mayor out of the loop entirely by delaying its approval action until the last moment or by failing to act at all; [60] and if the assembly includes the mayor by acting promptly, it risks excluding itself if it ultimately is unable to override a veto. Finally, distributing the assembly's share of school-budget power is bound to have awkward institutional ramifications. A school board acts as its district's legislative body. [61] Subsection .060(c) narrowly delegates this power to the assembly, effectively designating the municipality's legislative body as the board's legislative adjunct. But in this adjunct capacity, the assembly serves the same executive as the board: the school district superintendent. By introducing the mayor to this institutional mix, the court adds a second executive head to the district's adjunct legislative body, creating a patchwork anatomy that invites institutional turmoil. The district's adjunct legislative body now must respond to conflicting signals emanating from separate heads on opposite sides of its torso. I seriously doubt that any local government would haveor could havedevised such a strange process intentionally. And I am convinced that a state government dedicated to maintaining an independent local school system under Alaska's constitutional mandate for pervasive state authority in the field of education [62] should not tolerate its continued existence.