Senate Approves Measure to Keep Legislation Intact Despite Population Shifts
State lawmakers returned to Jefferson City on Monday after the annual legislative spring break. The Senate spent its first week back holding hearings on House bills, working through the Senate Consent calendar and debating a range of issues, including measures relating to the regulation of public utilities and settlement offers in tort claims. The Senate also took up and passed my Senate Bill 124, which provides that changes in population shall not remove a city, county or political subdivision from operation of a law.
It has long been the practice of the Missouri General Assembly to draft measures pertaining to specific political subdivisions based on their population size. Today, there are hundreds of these statutes, and they affect everything from fire districts to special school districts and dictate all manner of government functions. When drafting legislation, lawmakers recognize there will be natural shifts in population over time. It is therefore safe to say it has never been our intent for a statute to become invalid because it was written for a county that once had more than 150,000 residents but today only has 148,000. Unfortunately, we recently saw a scenario similar to this play out in our court system.
To summarize, a recent lawsuit regarding St. Louis County challenged whether a certain statute still applied even though the county’s population had dropped below the benchmark in its legal description. The Missouri Western District Court of Appeals ruled it didn’t. So why does the court’s ruling matter to the 20th District? The answer lies in the fact that we can probably find examples of population-specific statutes for every county in the state. We have at least three between Christian and Greene counties alone. Imagine the mess that would occur if even this small number of statutes were suddenly deemed invalid simply because a few thousand or hundred residents — or, theoretically, even one — moved in or out of the county. Now think about the chaos that could occur in a place like St. Louis County, which has more than 40 of these laws.
Although the case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court and dismissed earlier this month, it has revealed a situation that could easily spiral out of control if the Legislature fails to clarify our original intent — a fact the Supreme Court expressly stated in its opinion:
“Precisely because of the general interest and widespread effect should this Court hold that a political subdivision can fall out of the scope of a population statute, it may well be that the legislature will address and clarify the meaning of section 1.100.2 before this issue recurs. This would make it unnecessary for this Court to address the issue and would avoid the parade of horribles that it is alleged would occur were this Court to hold that St. Louis County or other political subdivisions were no longer subject to statutes that have governed them for years if not decades.”
Senate Bill 124 clarifies that if a city, county or political subdivision’s population was correctly stated at the time the statute was originally drafted, any subsequent change in population shall not remove the entity from the operation of that law. Recognizing the importance of addressing this issue sooner rather than later, I’m pleased to say the Senate voted unanimously to advance SB 124 to the House.
If you have any questions or comments regarding your state government, please feel free to contact me at (573) 751-1503. You are also welcome to e-mail me at jay.wasson@senate.mo.gov.