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would have to go to work as soon as those
figures were available and get them into
the General Assembly promptly, and hope-
fully the General Assembly would then
take action so that there would be an op-
portunity to set up congressional districts
for the primary election.
THE CHAIRMAN: So that the Com-
mittee would intend that the words, in
lines 23 and 24, "immediately prior to the
statewide congressional general election"
would mean any time after the census fig-
ures were available and prior to the pri-
mary election?
DELEGATE GALLAGHER: Yes, sir,
that is correct, between the time of the
1970 federal census count being available
and the primary election.
THE CHAIRMAN: Are there any other
questions?
THE CHAIRMAN: The Chair hears
none.
Would you please proceed, then, with
the Committee's report on the next subject?
DELEGATE GALLAGHER: The next
section having to do with continuity of gov-
ernment during an emergency is one which
has become fashionable in recent consti-
tutions.
The purpose of this is to provide for con-
tinuity of government in the event of an
emergency, disaster, or enemy attack, and
for continued operation of government.
The reason it is necessary to include this
section in the constitution is that the Com-
mittee contemplates that in times of disas-
ter it would be necessary to suspend some
constitutional operations, some constitu-
tional procedures. I am not talking about
the area of personal rights, but I am talk-
ing about the area of office holding.
Let us suppose that something happened
to Annapolis while the General Assembly
was in session and that a large number of
the members of the General Assembly were
killed. We would anticipate that the Gen-
eral Assembly would, prior to such a disas-
ter, indicate that in the event that a
quorum were not alive or could not be
called there would be some other method
of operating the General Assembly.
We would anticipate that if all the con-
stitutional officers were wiped out so that
the orderly filling of vacancies could not
take place in a disaster, the General As-
sembly would pass legislation prior to such
an emergency saying in such event the
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governor shall be selected under these cir-
cumstances or the governor shall be the
man who holds office in this particular area.
The same thing for the operation of gov-
ernment. If you cannot get a General As-
sembly together and you cannot appropriate
funds because of a disaster, government
would be stalemated, and we would con-
template therefore that the General As-
sembly would pass laws which, despite
constitutional provisions, would in an emer-
gency allow the disbursement of state
monies, even though it could not otherwise
be constitutionally accomplished.
We debated the inclusion of this at some
length. I might say we had great pressure
on us from the state civil defense organiza-
tion to pass a very lengthy kind of emer-
gency constitutional provision, but we felt
that we wanted to reduce it to a skeletal
form, to merely provide that the General
Assembly could pass legislation in these
two areas anticipating a disaster, and at
the same time in so doing set aside or allow
the possibility of setting aside some consti-
tutional procedures.
If we did not include this in the consti-
tution then the General Assembly could do
nothing to anticipate an emergency except
as would be allowed by the constitution.
If this would be the case, the General As-
sembly might find that it could not ade-
quately handle an anticipated disaster.
Consequently, we feel the language is
necessary.
I might say the Committee went back
and forth three or four times before it ul-
timately decided to do it. This language in
3.19 is the best language we could arrive
at after studying the Rhode Island and
New York constitutions in both of these re-
gards. We felt that this was the best
method of approaching the problem.
THE CHAIRMAN: Are there any ques-
tions of the Committee Chairman?
THE CHAIRMAN: The Chair hears no
questions.
The Chair has one question, Delegate
Gallagher, with respect to the second sen-
tence, and the same language is used in
the first sentence.
What is meant by the phrase "continuity
of state and local public offices and gov-
ernmental operations" insofar as provisions
of the constitution are concerned?
DELEGATE GALLAGHER: The mean-
ing of the language is that the General
Assembly may provide who shall exercise
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