Court Opinion

ID: 9765005
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 03:47:40.916478+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:03.222694
License: Public Domain

Cole, J.,

dissenting:

Article XIA § 5 of the Maryland Constitution vests in the citizens of Baltimore City the right to amend their city charter. The only limitations imposed upon this right are found in §§ 2 and 6 of that article which together forbid the City from exceeding the powers granted by the State. Acting within these limitations, the voters of Baltimore City amended the charter by providing for a system of rent control.
Today, the majority of this Court, inserting its own limitations upon the City’s right to amend, declares the amendment null and void as being legislative in. character and not proper charter material. The majority reasons that a charter amendment must be limited in substance to that which alters the form or structure of government and, therefore, may not encompass subject matters within the City’s police or general welfare powers. Stated differently, the majority holds that the rent control proposal can only be valid if the people share the legislative power with the City Council, and because Article XIA vests "full power” to enact local laws in the City Council the voters do not have the *633right to approve an amendment which the City Council could enact as legislation. To hold otherwise, the majority contends, would permit the voters the right to initiate legislation which would constitute an impermissible enlargement or extension of those powers expressly granted. I disagree and, therefore, dissent.
The rationale by which the majority reaches its conclusion is nothing new; it has been advanced and rejected by many courts throughout the country. Years ago, opponents attacked the Eighteenth Amendment as legislative in character, as unrelated to the form and structure of government, and as violative of the constitution which vests all legislative power in Congress. The United States Supreme Court was unpersuaded and the amendment was upheld. National Prohibition Cases, 253 U.S. 350, 40 S. Ct. 486, 64 L. Ed. 946 (1920).
In State v. Thompson, 323 Mo. 742, 19 S.W.2d 642, 646 (1929) the Missouri Supreme Court was presented with an amendment involving a lengthy and complex system providing for the raising of state highway bonds. Here, too, the opponents of the amendment claimed it was legislative in character. That court stated that "[w]ith respect to the matters of details as affecting its validity, it is only necessary that such amendment conform to the requirement of ... the Constitution .. ..” that no amendment contain more than one subject. Nine years later the same court was again faced with a challenge to an amendment to the state’s constitution on the ground that it was legislative in character. Marsh v. Bartlett, 343 Mo. 526, 121 S.W.2d 737 (1938). Again the Missouri Supreme Court held that the only limitation on the amendment was "singleness of subject matter.”
These same principles which apply to the amendment of the federal and state constitutions apply equally to the amendment of municipal charters subject to the added qualification that the amendment conform to the state constitution and be consistent with the general laws of the state. In State ex rel. St. Louis F.F. Ass’n Loc. No. 73 v. *634Stemmler, 479 S.W.2d 456 (Mo. 1972), an amendment to the charter of the City of St. Louis was challenged on the ground that the power to fix salaries was a legislative responsibility which could not be exercised by the people. The Missouri Supreme Court held that the people of the city had the right to write into their charter any provision they wished subject only to the restrictions of federal and state law. The court said:
A consideration of this question necessitates a recognition of the basic fact that the people themselves are the source of all governmental power. Their will is supreme. They spell out in their constitution what form their government shall take and what powers it shall have.
* * *
[W]e find that the people of Missouri, by provisions written into the state constitution. . ., have said that the people of St. Louis may write their own charter for their city government. [Id. at 458],
Other courts have impliedly if not expressly sustained this fundamental right of the people to amend their constitution. In City of Jackson v. Nims, 316 Mich. 694, 26 N.W.2d 569 (1947), the Supreme Court of Michigan, in rejecting an attack on a constitutional amendment providing for a return of one cent of state sales tax to be divided among cities, villages, townships and schools, stated:
In the present situation the proposal has been adopted by the voters as an amendment to the Constitution. There is no merit in the claim that it must now be set aside on the ground that the proposal should have been initiated as legislation.
"The people have an inherent right to so amend the Constitution so as to take away from, or add to, the powers of either department of the government.” People v. Cook (syllabus), 147 Mich. 127, 110 N.W. 514.
*635See Downs v. City of Birmingham, 240 Ala. 177, 198 So. 231 (1940); In re Interrogatories by the Governor, etc., 99 Colo. 591, 65 P.2d 7 (1937). Thus, I believe that the majority’s conclusion on the threshold question as to whether a charter amendment may be legislative in character violates the basic democratic principle that the people have the right to determine for themselves by what rule of conduct they shall be governed, so long as that rule does not conflict with some higher authority such as federal or state law.
However, in any event, I disagree with the conclusions they draw from their examination and construction of the various sections of Article XIA. The majority misses the mark. It proceeds to an intricate analysis of §§ 2, 3, and 6 and concludes that the amendment divests the City Council of its power to legislate in the area of rent control and thus enlarges the powers granted to the City. Section 3 has nothing at all to do with the process of amending the charter; it merely empowers the council to enact local laws. It is only when this section is read in conjunction with §§ 2 and 6 that the majority finds a limitation on the § 5 amendment power. In analyzing these sections the majority misconstrues the basic purposes of the limitations found therein.
These limitations are aimed at preventing the political subdivision (the City) from attempting to use the charter amendment process to authorize legislation over subject matter areas beyond those which the State has expressly granted the City and they are in no sense aimed at restricting the people’s rights in relation to their own legislative body.
Section 6 provides:
The power heretofore conferred upon the General Assembly to prescribe the number, compensation, powers and duties of the County Commissioners in each County, and the power to make changes in Sections 1 to 6 inclusive, Article XI of this Constitution, when expressly granted as *636hereinbefore provided, are hereby transferred to the voters of each County and the voters of City of Baltimore, respectively, provided that said powers so transferred shall be exercised only by the adoption or amendment of a charter as hereinbefore provided; and provided further that this Article shall not be construed to authorize the exercise of any powers in excess of those conferred by the Legislature upon Counties or City as this Article sets forth.
The majority states that "the power of the City voters under § 6 ... is restricted . .. that such authority may not be exercised in violation of others powers vested in the City .. ..” By using the phrase "in violation of’ the majority is able to conclude that the rent control amendment conflicts with § 3 claiming it divests the City Council of its power to legislate on the subject of rent control. But § 6 does not say "in violation of.” It says that the power to amend may not be "construed to authorize the exercise of any powers in excess of those conferred by the Legislature upon said . .. City . . ..” When considered in light of the purpose of the Home Rule Amendment, it becomes clear that the majority has misunderstood the purpose of this express limitation.
The purpose of the Home Rule Amendment was to provide for the distribution of power between the Legislature and the political subdivisions of the State. The purpose of the limitations in §§ 2 and 6 is to insure that the political subdivisions do not exceed the power distributed to them. I repeat, they have nothing to do with the people’s rights as those rights relate to their local legislative body. Thus § 6 merely forbids the use of amendment power by the political subdivision to grant unto itself more power than has been granted by the State. It has nothing to do with who within the subdivision the people may designate or permit to exercise that power.
Section 2 provides:
The General Assembly shall by public general *637law provide a grant of express powers for such County or Counties as may thereafter form a charter under the provisions of this Article. Such express powers granted to the Counties and the powers heretofore granted to the City of Baltimore, as set forth in Article 4, Section 6, Public Local Laws of Maryland, shall not be enlarged or extended by any charter formed under the provisions of this Article, but such powers may be extended, modified, amended or repealed by the General Assembly.
To understand the limitations of § 2 it is necessary to recognize that the Home Rule Amendment does not empower the local subdivisions to legislate over any particular subject matter. It is only when the General Assembly expressly grants to the subdivision the power to act in a given field that the subdivision may do so. For example, unless the General Assembly has granted the political subdivision the power to enact provisions pursuant to the police power the subdivision has no authority to enact any law under that power. In the case of home rule counties, the expressly granted powers are conferred by Article 25A of the Maryland Code. In the case of Baltimore City the grant of express powers is found in the charter itself; this is so because the General Assembly had by public local law granted to the City certain express powers many years before the adoption of the Home Rule Amendment. These are the powers to which the limitation (subject matter and nothing more) refers. The majority agrees that the adoption of a system of rent control is within the police power expressly granted to the City. They should agree also that therefore the amendment in question does not represent an extension or enlargement of the powers granted the City.
The majority contends that § 3 grants to the City Council full power to enact local laws and therefore precludes the people from adopting this amendment because it would divest the council of its powers to legislate on rent control. The majority equates full with exclusive and in so doing *638ignores the plain language of our holding in Ritchmount Partnership v. Board, 283 Md. 48, 63, 388 A.2d 523 (1978).
Likewise, the declaration in § 3 that the council have "full power” to enact local laws does not imply exclusivity. Rather, it is more likely that the phrase "full power” was meant to describe the quality of the legislative power vested in the council and granted by the General Assembly. In other words, with respect to the powers delegated to it, the County Council is to have as ample and complete power to legislate over local affairs as the General Assembly possessed prior to the ratification of Article XIA and the enactment of the Express Powers Act. Thus, while Article XIA, § 3 bestows upon the county council ample and complete power to legislate within the limits set forth in the Express Powers Act, it does not necessarily confer the exclusive power to do so. [citations omitted].
On this premise, even though Ritchmount dealt with the right to petition to referendum reserved by the people, there is no reason the people by charter amendment could not place the subject matter of rent control in the hands of a commission over which, by virtue of such charter creation, the City Council may have to share its delegation of police power.
The majority attempts to limit Ritchmount to the power of referendum and to distinguish the power of initiative. The referendum according to the majority is merely an after-the-fact power to pass upon the legislative action of the council while the initiative is the power to actually initiate legislation. The majority contends that the exercise of initiative by the people is therefore inconsistent with the primacy of the council as the elected lawmaking body. The majority seems to ignore footnote 10 in Ritchmount.
10. Seeking to circumvent the restrictions imposed by § 3, appellees contend that the referendum power is in effect a veto and therefore is not properly *639considered to be an exercise of legislative power in conflict with the lawmaking authority vested in the county council of charter counties. While there is some authority to support this position, . . . the better reasoned view, in our opinion, is that the referendum, as well as the veto power vested in the executive, is an aspect of the legislative power much like that invoked by the Senate when it considers a bill passed by the House, [citations omitted].
In other words, the basis for the Ritchmount decision was not that the power of referendum was an after-the-fact veto like power; to the contrary, this note makes clear that the basis for our decision was that the people shared the legislative power with the council.1 Any doubt about this interpretation can be resolved by an examination of the cases which we cited in Ritchmount:
In State v. City of Duluth, 134 Minn. 355, 159 N.W. 792, 795 (1916) the court said:
Requiring a legislative body to be a feature of all home-rule charters does not necessarily mean that no legislative functions can be exercised by any other body. While the legislative body undoubtedly becomes the repository of all legislative power possessed by the city and not expressly given to some other body, we find nothing in the language of the Constitution which requires us to hold that no legislative power can be given to the electors.
In Pitman v. Drabelle, 267 Mo. 78, 183 S.W. 1055, 1057 (1916), that court said:
It is of the very essence of free government that the laws regulating a community should reflect the view and voice of a majority of the voters. Hence the plan (initiative) by which the people are empowered to do the business which their recalcitrant *640representatives have failed to perform has met with full judicial sanction.
... We are unable to find anything in the language of the Constitution under review which prohibits the people of St. Louis, after having provided in their charter for one house of legislation, to reserve to themselves the power to legislate in case of the refusal of that body to act. [citations omitted].2
We cited these cases as support for our statement in Ritchmount that the vesting of full power to legislate in the council did not "altogether preclude the existence of other entities [e.g., the people] with coordinate legislative powers.” [283 Md. at 63 (emphasis added)]. I believe Ritchmount was correctly decided.
The majority, in its analysis, appears to lump together the question of whether the people may use the charter amendment process to enact material which is legislative in character with the question of whether the people may provide in their charter for a mechanism by which they may exercise the initiative over local laws. In doing so, the distinction between charter initiative (the power to amend the charter) and the power to initiate local laws (ordinances) has slipped between the cracks. In any event, the second question is not before the Court for decision.
The issue we are called upon to decide is whether the voters of Baltimore City have the power to enact a system of rent control by charter initiative. I believe that, consistent with the limitation that the amendment must not exceed the general laws of the state, the people of Baltimore City have the sovereign right to insert in their charter any provision they desire.

. It is clear that a charter amendment which is legislative in character would have the tendency to preempt the field for the legislative body except in so far as it permitted that body to implement the people’s expressed desire.

. The only authority cited by the majority is a New York case, Astwood v. Cohen, 291 N.Y. 484, 53 N.E.2d 358 (1944). A proposed amendment to the New York City Charter would have provided for the payment of a salary bonus to every policeman and fireman in the city. The New York Court of Appeals found the amendment invalid because it amended nothing in the city charter, the provisions for salaries of policemen and firemen being in the administrative code. In the same year Astwood was decided the New York Legislature amended its home rule law to include the provisions, "[a] charter amendment may be of any extent and deal with any number of subjects.”