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City of Enid7/5/2005
in accordance with the laws of this state". Under these definitions, a law that affects the people of a city by granting the privilege of collective bargaining to municipal employees and requiring the municipal employer to bargain with the employees' representative certainly touches upon city affairs. Clearly, the Act touches upon matters of a city that affect the people of the city. No other application can be had if we, as we must, apply the phrase "regulating the affairs of cities" to carry out the principle embodied in the constitutional provision. See Welch v. Holland, 1936 OK 598, 61 P.2d 559. No special state law may regulate the affairs of cities.
The Oklahoma Constitution, art. 5, § 46 prohibits the Legislature from enacting special laws that regulate the affairs of cities, although it may do so by general law. A general law is one that applies equally to all persons, things or entities embraced in a class founded on some natural, intrinsic or constitutional distinction, while a special law confers some right or imposes some duty on some but not all of the class of those who stand upon the same footing and same relation to the subject of the law. Roberts v. Ledgerwood, 1928 OK 723, , 272 P. 448, Syllabus by the Court; Oklahoma City v. Griffin, 1965 OK 76, , 403 P.2d 463, 465. It is argued that the Act is a general law because larger cities are on a different footing than smaller cities for purposes of collective bargaining. This argument, however, fails to recognize that art. 5, § 46 specifies "cities" as a distinct class of entities.
The Oklahoma Constitution, art. 5, § 46, requires any statute "regulating the affairs of cities" to be general in nature - to apply equally to "cities". So as not to be a special law proscribed by art. 5, § 46, a statute regulating the affairs of cities, must embrace all cities in the state rather than embracing only a subclass of larger cities. This is the only meaningful application of art. 5, § 46. Any other application would allow the Legislature to regulate the affairs of some cities but not all cities, rendering the provision meaningless.
Although there are more than 150 cities in Oklahoma according to recent U.S. Census information in the appellate record, the Oklahoma Municipal Employee Collective Bargaining Act confers the right of collective bargaining on municipal employees of a distinct subclass of eleven cities. By creating an artificial class of municipalities that have populations greater than 35,000, the Act carves a niche of municipal employees and grants them the right to bargain collectively with their respective municipal employers. The employees of this small class of eleven cities are employed in substantially the same or similar positions as many municipal employees of other mid-size and small cities all over the state working in sanitation, utilities, parks, and other public and private municipal endeavors. To avoid the special treatment of a special law, the privilege of collective bargaining must be extended to employees of all the cities throughout the state if it is extended to any. This Court said much the same in Maule v. Indep. Sch. Dist. No. 9 of Tulsa County, 1985 OK 110, , 714 P.2d 198, 204, when we concluded that " iscrimination between teachers employed by school districts based solely on population offends art. 5 § 46." (Bold added.)
We are cognizant of the breadth of the Legislature's sovereign power. However, the prohibition unambiguously proclaimed in the Okla. Const., art. 5, § 46 operates to limit the sovereign Legislature. The Oklahoma Constitution, art. 5, § 46 is an absolute and unequivocal prohibition against special legislation in the listed subject areas, Reynolds at , 760 P
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