Court Opinion

ID: 9674154
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 04:24:04.65147+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:25.876188
License: Public Domain

On Rehearing.
PER CURIAM.
Relators’ motion for rehearing is largely devoted to a reargument of the issues determined in our original opinion. A careful review of the briefs filed upon submission of the case and the briefs filed in support of the motion for rehearing, including the brief filed by the City of St. Louis as amicus curies, leaves us convinced that the case was correctly ruled.
However, relators have challenged a statement made argumentatively in the course of the opinion. Although the statement was made and is of moment only as one of the least important of several independent approaches to the ultimate ascertainment of any intent on the part of the framers of the Constitution to make art. 6, Sections 18(a) to 18(7), V.A.M.S., applicable to the City of St. Louis, relators’ challenge of it, nevertheless, deserves mention. We said, in effect, that prior to adoption of the Constitution of 1945 the State had zealously guarded its right to maintain the police departments of both the City of St. Louis and Kansas City and that the exercise by the City of St. Louis of the powers given. to counties by Sections 18(a) to 18(Z) would require it to take over its state-maintained police department, thereby creating the anomalous situation of leaving the Kansas City police department under the jurisdiction of the State. Relators say that if adoption of a charter by the City of St. Louis under Sections 18(a) to 18 (Z) would oblige it to assume control of its police department, it must follow that if in the future Jackson County should or*481ganize as a special charter county under Sections 18(a) to 18(Z) it would also be obliged to assume jurisdiction of the police department of Kansas City.
Not so, we think. Jackson County encompasses territory beyond the confines of Kansas City. As one of the 114 de jure counties of the State, it maintains co-extensively with its boundaries (including Kansas City) an active sheriff’s department in accord with the mandatory provisions of the general statutes relating to the powers and duties of sheriffs in each of said counties. Sections 57.010 to 57.200. Consequently, if and when Jackson County adopts special charter government, it could meet the requirements of Section 18(b) that it “provide * * * for the exercise of all powers and duties of counties and county officers prescribed by the constitution and laws of the state”, without, in any manner, encroaching upon the state-maintained police department of Kansas City; and, at the same time, avail itself of the services of the latter within the confines of the city to whatever extent the State would permit or afford it. On the other hand, the City of St. Louis, which does not maintain a sheriff’s department possessed of jurisdiction to “quell and suppress assaults and batteries, riots, routs, affrays, and insurrections * * * apprehend and commit to jail all felons and traitors * * * ”, as required of all of the 114 de jure counties by Section 57.100, of necessity would be called upon to take over the functioning of the police department, at least to the extent of providing for the exercise of the duties imposed upon sheriffs of the 114 de jure counties of the State. This, for the reason that there is no other agency in the City of St. Louis through which the powers generally exercised by sheriffs in the 114 counties of the State may be there exercised, as Section 18(b) requires of all counties adopting special charters.
Certain of the contentions in the city’s brief also deserve mention. One is that in “construing the Constitution as a whole it is necessary to assume that the framers of the Constitution, by recognizing the City of St. Louis as a county under a home rule article of the Constitution, necessarily intended that there not be one measure of home rule for certain counties and another measure of home rule or a lack of home rule for others.”
Logically, such a statement begs the question in its entirety. The very fact that the framers of the Constitution deemed it necessary to set forth definitively and separately the charter powers conferred exclusively upon the City of St. Louis in Sections 31-33 and to clearly indicate therein the reason for so doing, to wit: the problems peculiar to its dual existence, permits an inference that Sections 18(a) to 18(0, defining the charter powers of counties not conjoined with cities, and Sections 19-20, defining the charter powers of cities not conjoined with counties, were not applicable to the City of St. Louis. But such an inference was not indulged. To the contrary, our conclusions were specifically predicated upon a detailed study and analysis of all of the aforesaid provisions.
And finally, the city’s brief, in the last paragraph, states: “We find it difficult to believe for the reasons suggested herein that the largest unit of Missouri government was intended to be discriminated against by the framers of the 1945 Constitution.”
Certainly, we found no evidence of any intended discrimination against the city by the framers of the Constitution. Rather did we find a painstaking attempt to meet and deal with a problem that concededly has vexed municipal, county and state government ever since St. Louis elected many years ago to assume its dual status of city and county. Whether the result of their labor, as expressed in Sections 31-33, is sound or unsound, good or bad, is not ours to say; that is strictly a political function. Our duty, in this action, is to ascertain and declare the true intent and meaning of *482the provisions in question. We believe the original opinion does that.
The motion for rehearing is overruled.
STORCKMAN, J„ dissents.