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City of Enid7/5/2005
Municipal Employees Collective Bargaining Act (Act), 11 O.S. Supp. 2004 §51-200 et seq., which confines collective bargaining benefits to employees of municipalities whose population exceeds thirty-five thousand persons. The court holds the Act invalid. I accede to its judgment and to today's pronouncement. Writing in concurrence, I offer an addendum to the analytical framework for the issue at hand.
A statute collides with the §46 uniformity requirements when it targets for different treatment less than a whole class embraced within one of that section's prohibited subjects. It is not denied that (1) §46 mandates in absolute terms statewide uniformity for acts " egulating the affairs of counties, cities, towns, wards, or school districts ..." and (2) the Act here under consideration falls under that rubric of enactments. Conformity to the standards of Art. 5 §59, Okl. Const., presents for legal testing an issue different from that required under §46. While §46 prohibits the passage of any special (or local) law on a variety of subjects regardless of whether a suitable general law could (or could not) have been framed, the latter section (§59) merely calls for statutes to be cast in the form of general laws which would appear to have uniform application. Within the meaning of §59 a special law is permissible if a general law could not be fitted. Not so under the standards of §46. The §46 command is absolute, unequivocal and unqualified. It defies testing by the standards of §59. If the founding drafters did not intend to set aside the named §46 subjects for much tougher scrutiny than that required by §59, that section (§46) would have been redundant. Without §46's inclusion, §59 would have covered the universe of legislation, including the very subjects that stand singled out for tougher constitutional scrutiny by their listing in §46.
A subject prohibited from inclusion in a special (or local) law may not be disuniformly dealt with by any legislative enactment. Employees of cities with a population of less than thirty-five thousand persons must be accorded a treatment that does not differ from that extended to employees of cities with a population of over thirty-five thousand persons.
In summary, the dichotomous division of cities into population brackets for application to collective bargaining benefits for city employees offends the §46's mandated norms of uniformity, symmetry and evenhanded treatment.
I hence join the court's judgment and its pronouncement.
Lavender, J., with whom Kauger, J., joins, dissenting in part.
I respectfully dissent in part to the majority opinion for the reason the opinion misconstrues what is or is not a local or special law within the meaning of OKLA. CONST. art. 5, § 46, as opposed to a general law. The City of Enid here challenges the constitutionality of the Oklahoma Municipal Employee Collective Bargaining Act (Act), 11 O. S. Supp. 2004, § 51-200 et seq., claiming, in part, the Act violates § 46 because of the Act's population classification. In my view, the majority opinion misinterprets the intent of the framers of the Oklahoma Constitution, who never intended for § 46 to act as a blanket or absolute prohibition against classifying cities on the basis of their population no matter what the purpose of the legislation in regard to regulation of city affairs. Although certain legislative population-based classification concerning regulating the affairs of cities may fail to pass constitutional muster under § 46, not all such classification does. In other words, there is nothing in § 46 that requires all cities be treated alike by the Legislature for all purposes respecting regulation of city affai
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