THE BONDAGE OF CITIES - The Community Environmental Legal ...

HOME KULE FOR OUR CITIES. 423Granting' to any corporation, association, or individual any specialor exclusive right, privilege, or immunity, or to any corporation,association, or individual, the right to lay down a railroad track;Legalizing the unauthorized or invalid acts of any state ormunicipal officer;In all other cases where a general law can be made applicable,no local or special law shall be enacted; and whether a general lawcould have been made applicable in any case ishereby declared ajudicial question, and as such shall be judicially determined, withoutregard to any legislative assertion on that subject.Nor shall the general assembly, indirectly, enact such special orlocal law by the partial repeal of a general law, but laws repealinglocalor special acts may be passed.There are other provisions against special legislation, butthese are all that materially affect municipalities. One mightthink that local legislation had been abolished, but that is notquite true. At the last session (1897) the Missouri legislaturepassed a special act defining the boundaries of the city ofPalmyra, and another to give the city of Poplar Bluff authorityto vacate a cemetery.Section 54 of Article IV., provides that NO local or speciallaw shall be passed unless a notice of it stating its substanceshall be published in the locality affected at least -thirty daysbefore the introduction of the bill in the general assembly.The constitutions of all the other four states we have beenconsidering provide quite fully against special, legislation,largely in the same words as those just quoted from Missouri,so that the freehold charters are not likely to be much inter-1fered with except by general legislation. They are clearlysubject to this to some extent in all the states named, and insome of them, at least, no portion of the municipal business,() "A law is general and constitutional when it applies equally to allpersons embraced iu a class founded upon some natural or intrinsic or constitutionaldistinction, it is not general if it confers particulav privileges, orimposes peculiar disabilities or burdensome conditions in the exercise of acommon right upon a class of persons arbitrarily selected from the generalbody of those who stand in precisely the same relation to the subject of thelaw." City of Pasadena v. Stimson, 91 Cal. 238, 251; see also llauer v. Williams,118 Cal. 401.Legislation affecting cities having 150,000 or more inhabitants is an improperattempt by the act itself to create a class of municipal corporations fora special purpose, without reference to the existing classification by generallaw, and is local and special legislation. Denman v. Broderick, 111 Cal. 96.Classification must be founded on differences defined by the constitution,or which are natural, and suggest a reason which might rationally be heldto justify the diversity in the legislation. In a general law, none must beomitted that stand on the same footing regarding the subject of legislation.Legislatures cannot, by special act, create a class of cities of a populationBetween 10,000 and 25,000 for the purpose of increasing the salaries of pollcanerin a particular city; act void, Darcy v. San Jose, 104 Cal. 642.