MUNICIPAL HOME RULE IN COLORADO

Authors

Alfred S. Reinhart, Dorchester, Massachusetts

Abstract

If the actual adoption of constitutional municipal home rule is the product of the West, there can be little doubt that it is the product of the experience of the East. For had not New York and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, to mention a few salient examples, demonstrated the almost incredible extents to which interference by legislatures in the local affairs of their creatures, the municipalities, might reach, it is safe to say that the chances are preponderant that the western states themselves would have had to suffer through the evils consequent on legislative butting before municipal home rule would have made the headway it has made in our great trans-Mississippi territory. So when we learn that the municipal home-rule provisions of Washington and Oklahoma and Arizona are actually integral parts of the original respective state constitutions concerned, we must not regard them as spontaneously conceived solutions of an age-old problem, but merely as ameliorative provisions adopted in the wake of a long eastern experience, and in flattering reflection on the few older western states which saw fit to enact home-rule amendments to their state constitutions. I do not mean for a moment to imply that the aforementioned constitutional provisions acted as dei ex machinis by which cities became immune from legislative interference in their local matters; the point is that the states noted lack the long preliminary struggle for municipal home rule that we find elsewhere.

Recommended Citation

Alfred S. Reinhart, MUNICIPAL HOME RULE IN COLORADO, 28 Mich. L. Rev. 382 (1930).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol28/iss4/3