|
By Dewey English and Carol B.
McPhail
Local governments forced by Alabama’s constitution
to beg for basic services have saddled the ballot with hundreds of amendments
in the past 93 years.
A computer analysis by the Mobile Register indicates that
the pace of constitutional amendments is on track to top 620 by the
end of the 1990s, a level unprecedented among states.
Moreover, the analysis makes clear that the 1901 constitution
has compelled the state to play a risky game with changing times.
As each passing decade remade lives and livelihoods, local
communities rummaged for more and more amendments in the hope of keeping
up. Alabama’s constitution ensures that they are powerless to do
otherwise.
The restless 1960s produced 171 amendments, most of them
local in nature. The technological 1990s are on the way to producing
123 or more additional amendments.
"We’re doing governance by constitutional amendment
rather than through our locally elected officials," said Keith Ward,
who directs the Center for Governmental Services at Auburn University.
"It’s a delaying kind of thing that keeps governments
from reacting responsibly to the problems at hand."
Among findings of the analysis that Register staff members
conducted through the Alabama Law Institute at the University of Alabama:
€ For the most part, Alabama’s 555 constitutional amendments have
not dealt with lofty rights or liberties. Sixty nine percent have affected
only one county, one city or a county and its cities.
€ Local communities routinely have had to seek constitutional amendments
just to improve their schools, encourage economic development or build
hospitals and roads. As many as 125 amendments fall into this category
- granting a specific community the power to undertake one of these
four essential tasks.
€ Urban, rapidly industrializing counties have paid the highest price
of the constitution’s inflexibility. Among the 67 counties, Mobile
has obtained the most amendments, 32, followed by Jefferson, home of
Birmingham, with 17 and Madison, home of Huntsville, with 15.
€ The rise in constitutional amendments from decade to decade suggests
that the constitution has long been obsolete. The 1960s saw almost three
times as many amendments as the 1950s. The 1970s brought a lull - perhaps
a period of digestion - but the numbers have picked up since.
In the last election alone, the ballot held 26 amendments,
their fates still not known early last week.
A politicized process
An amendment requires months of work at the least before
it can become law. There are legislators to lobby, voters to court and
a general election to win.
And the constitution has required that many of the smallest
functions of local government be subject to statewide votes. For local
communities, the highly politicized process can be exasperating.
Just to get a measure on the ballot, local officials have
had to look for help in Montgomery. "They had to spend so much time
going to the Legislature to get a constitutional proposal passed," said
William Stewart, a University of Alabama political scientist who has
written two books on the state’s constitution. "They could have
devoted time and energy to the particular problem."
Since 1950, more than 225 amendments have failed either
in the Legislature or at the polls, according to a review of the state
code and legislative records.
Communities found the constitution particularly confining
when they confronted social and economic upheaval. During the 1960s,
for example, the state’s economy was shifting, segregation was
withering and family farm life had faded. Businesses clamored for transportation
and modern services.
The constitution "obviously was not designed for what we
encounter in the latter part of the 20th century," said O.H. "Buddy"
Sharpless, who lobbies the Legislature on behalf of county commissioners.
Huntsville in the 1960s was shaping its image as the hometown for rocket
science. But Alabama’s constitution didn’t help.
Huntsville and Madison County had to win backing for seven
amendments in the 1960s to improve schools and industrial recruitment,
and even to establish a space museum.
The framers of the 1901 constitution could never have envisioned
the rocket age. They also could not have foreseen the boom and bust
cycle that the space program would create for the agricultural town.
For years after the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center
opened in 1960, it put hundreds of millions of dollars into the Huntsville-area
economy as the nation shot for the moon. Meanwhile, the city’s
population zoomed from 16,000 in 1950 to 72,000 in 1960 and 123,000
in 1964.
"When a community is growing like that, they beg, they
borrow, they steal - they do everything they can because the pressures
of growth are tremendous," said Charles Younger, city attorney during
that time. "In order to take advantage of the opportunities the space
program offered, we had to have roads, schools, sewers, water systems
and so forth."
Other states wrestled with their outdated constitutions,
and some rewrote them. Alabama, meanwhile, snubbed reform and relied
on amendments to do the job.
Seven of the amendments that Mobile County has obtained
concerned healthcare improvements, including at least two to control
mosquitoes and rats.
Trying to react to tremendous expansion of Mobile’s
boundaries in the 1950s, officials were forced in the next decade to
take the circuitous route that the constitution had set out. They had
to ask legislators and voters statewide for amendments to rework streets
and roads and to run Mobile General Hospital, now the University of
South Alabama Medical Center.
"Any time any county wanted to do anything, they had to
continually go and get a constitutional amendment," said former Mobile
Mayor Joe Langan.
Five other amendments have gone either to Bayou la Batre
or Mobile area harbors.
Patchwork of laws
The crazy quilt of amendments since 1901 stuns even constitution
scholars. In fact, the amendments have hit the books so fast and furiously
that they were miscounted in 1933; there are 555 rather than the 554
that the numbering of recent amendments suggests.
California has the second most amendments, 485, that serve
a population more than seven times as large as Alabama’s.
Stewart’s new book, "The Alabama Constitution: A Reference
Guide," offers examples of the excruciating detail found in amendments.
Amendment 450, much longer than the U.S. Constitution, specifies the
rating necessary for corporate securities. A close second is Amendment
489, which authorizes the Alabama Music Hall of Fame Authority to acquire
tapes and CDs.
"That stuff belongs somewhere, but it doesn’t in the
basic fundamental law of the state," Stewart said. "That totally prostitutes
the concept of a constitution."
Huntsville’s Younger contends that the mass of local
amendments is the fault of legislators - and not of the Alabama constitution.
He said legislators could have granted power for fire districts, for
example, to all counties at once rather than to each one individually.
Then they could have prevented the constitution from becoming
a patchwork of laws.
Ward, the Auburn professor, disagrees. Even if legislators
introduced more efficient amendments, there still would be too many,
he said. Power would continue to rest at the state level, rather than
at the local level.
"It’s simply not a fact that the system as it exists
is a good system and that it’s not the fault of the constitution,"
Ward said. "The fact of the matter is that local legislators want to
control the local county."
And some academicians argue that counties and cities will
demand an increasing amount of amendments in order to keep up with dizzying
social and economic change ahead.
"We tried to write a constitution in 1901 that prevented
government from doing anything," said Bill Slaughter, a Birmingham lawyer
and constitution scholar. "We have evolved from that a number of stopgaps
and measures that have enabled us to cope with the modern world while
still struggling to deal with the original framework.
"It’s like trying to impose on an adolescent the suit
of clothes he had when he was 10 years old."
Return to: The
Legacy of Misplaced Power - Contents
Next: ‘Supremacy and the Stolen Vote’
Reprinted with Permission from the Mobile Register.
|
