Multiple members of Boston's delegation in the Masachusetts statehouse said Monday that state approval looks likely for the cancellation of a special mayoral election that after Mayor Marty Walsh’s resigns to become U.S. labor secretary.
If the current election schedule goes forward, the city would potentially hold four contests — a special election, the regularly scheduled November contest, and preliminary elections preceding each — within five months.
But unless the legislature approves Boston's request, the city can't do away with a special election. That got us here at GBH's Curiosity Desk to ask why.
"State and local relationships is one of the least understood, least paid attention to, but one of the longest-running tensions in the United States," said University of Nebraska Professor Emeritus Dale Krane, author of "Home Rule: A Fifty-State Handbook."
The tension Krane refers to is over the question of who has authority on local matters. And he said that at the outset of the American experiment, the answer was pretty clear.
"State government is essentially in control over local affairs," he said.
Not just here in Massachusetts, but everywhere. Krane noted that municipal government is not mentioned at all in the U.S. Constitution. And the power of states over cities was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the mid-1800s, when it endorsed a measure known as Dillon’s Rule, named for Iowa Supreme Court judge and legal scholar John F. Dillon.
Dillon’s rule stated that municipalities “derive their powers and rights wholly from the legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so may it destroy. If it may destroy; it may abridge and control."
"That is, whatever a city or county wants to do, it has to get permission from the state government," Krane said.
But as the 1800s gave way to the 1900s and immigration swelled the size of cities, Krane said cities began to battle for more autonomy and sought to chip away at the absolute power of the state over their affairs.
"And this battle begins to form into a movement which led to a series of amendments known as the home rule amendments," he said.
These home rule amendments, adopted by states across the country, explicitly allowed counties, cities and towns to do certain, specific things without seeking state approval.
"[They] granted [municipalities] much broader authorities in terms of how they set up their administrations, how they handle their finances, how they handle various other policy areas," Krane said.
The new authorities were broader, but they were also far from absolute. Here in Massachusetts, home rule became the law of the land in the 1940s.
"Home rule, it sounds great," said Gerald Frug, a professor at Harvard Law School. "You can do what you want. But there’s less there than meets the eye."
"There’s a home rule grant to cities that allows them to do certain things without going to the legislature every time. But that’s a limited set. It’s more limited than people think," Frug added.
The upshot is that even with home rule, cities and towns still must still seek approval from the legislature for all sorts of things — including, but not limited to, elections.
"So that could be a small town on the Cape or in Western Mass. that wants their assistant police chief to become police cheif without having to take an exam or something of that nature," said state Rep. Dan Hunt, D-Dorchester.
Hunt estimates that some 25% of the bills passed in the statehouse are related to home rule requests from cities and towns. Still, for how common these home rule petitions are, he does understand why this one is different.
"It’s much more high profile in terms of a home rule petition than some of the ones we rubber stamp on a regular basis," Hunt said.
The stakes are always high when you’re talking about who will occupy the corner office in the shining city on a hill.
The City Council and Walsh has approved Boston's request to cancel the special mayoral election. The home rule petition will likely be filed in the state legislature in the coming days.
