Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility

High court to hand down decision in home-rule case

By: Dan Shaw, [email protected]//June 21, 2016//

High court to hand down decision in home-rule case

By: Dan Shaw, [email protected]//June 21, 2016//

Listen to this article

A Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling scheduled for release Thursday promises to further define how much control local governments have over their own affairs even when state lawmakers act to strip them of some of that authority.

The case of Milwaukee Police Association v. City of Milwaukee specifically concerns a budget provision that state legislators adopted in 2013 seeking to overturn local ordinances that require public employees to live within a municipality’s borders. The one exception, included to protect public safety, allowed local governments to keep rules calling for police and fire workers to live within 15 miles of their jurisdictions.

Milwaukee officials took the new law to be a direct attack on their long-standing residency requirements and argued that it violated the principle of home rule. Enshrined in the state constitution, home rule is generally the idea that matters of primarily local concern should be left to local officials to decide.

The Milwaukee Professional Firefighters Association and the Milwaukee Police Association, whose members have long wanted to be free to choose where they live, countered with legal action, arguing that the state’s law should trump the city’s residency requirement.  Milwaukee County Judge Paul Van Grunsven agreed in a ruling handed down in January 2014.

Among other things, Van Grunsven argued that the state law was not specific to Milwaukee. Rather, it applies to “all cities, villages and towns” throughout the state and thus satisfies the requirement that laws be uniform in their treatment of those who are subject to them.

Milwaukee’s residency requirement was reinstated, though, on appeal. In a decision handed down in July 2015, the District 1 Court of Appeals found that the residency requirement directly affects the city’s ability to collect taxes and thus is a matter of local concern.

Rather than strike down the state law, though, the appeals court merely found that it “does not apply to the city of Milwaukee.”

In taking up the matter, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is likely to rely on a two-part test established in another case involving home rule: Madison Teachers Inc. v. Walker. The Supreme Court then established that any legal question involving home rule should first be decided by asking if it primarily involves local matters or, conversely, matters of statewide interest.

If the answer is “statewide matters,” then there is no possibility of conflict with the state constitution’s provision concerning home rule. If it does primarily involve local matters, though, then the court must ask if the law or regulation in question will be applied uniformly to everyone who will be subject to it.

If a particular piece of legislation is likely to fall more heavily on one particular municipality or group of municipalities, then it can be trumped by the home rule provision. Milwaukee officials argue that is exactly what would happen with the state law banning residency requirements, which they say was aimed specifically at their city.

Their opponents in the case argue that the law makes no mention of a particular city and thus affects every municipality in the state.

The dispute over residency requirements is just the latest instance of state legislators’ passing a law that local officials contend infringes on what should properly be their own authority.

In the past few years, the Republicans who control the state Legislature have also approved laws:

  • requiring Milwaukee Public Schools to sell of buildings that are deemed underused;
  •  restricting local governments’ ability to place regulations on cellphone towers;
  •  requiring that local governments that adopt special fees to pay for services such as street sweeping and garbage collection reduce property taxes by an equal amount; and
  • banning property-inspection policies that target certain neighborhoods to the exclusion of others

All these laws were met with complaints from critics who contended they violated the principle of home rule.

Polls

Should Steven Avery be granted a new evidentiary hearing?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Legal News

See All Legal News

WLJ People

Sea all WLJ People

Opinion Digests