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And why say anything about civil units?
Certainly under home rule the power is
vested in the counties. They have complete
authority to create new civil units. This is
an unnecessary provision.
Finally, in section 7.09, there is a provi-
sion that the General Assembly may pro-
vide for additional powers.
The amendment I have offered simply
recognizes, and I might say it is modeled
after the Alaska handling of this matter,
that the General Assembly may provide by
general law for the government of the mu-
nicipal corporations, including the incorpo-
ration, merger, dissolution and alteration
of boundaries thereof. Further, it permits
each municipal corporation to frame and
adopt a charter with amendment proce-
dures, for its own self-government, within
the limits and by procedures defined by
general law. Municipal corporations exist-
ing on the effective date of the Constitu-
tion shall retain the charter and other
legal powers until changed pursuant to the
provisions of this section.
The purpose of my submitting this is to
make it simple to recognize that from a
constitutional standpoint every municipality
will have the right to adopt a charter, and
offer amendments, and that the powers
will be defined by general law. I think that
is what the Committee tried to do, but they
said practically the same thing in a very
complicated way. I am submitting my
amendment for the purpose of simplicity.
THE CHAIRMAN: The Chair recog-
nizes Delegate Moser to speak in opposi-
tion to the amendment.
DELEGATE MOSER: Mr. Chairman,
ladies and gentlemen, I just got a look at
this simple amendment that Delegate James
proposed. I rise in opposition to it because
I think it does a lot of things that at least
the Local Government Committee hopes the
Convention will not want to adopt.
Let me state first that on immediate
reinspection it looks as though the dele-
gate proposal which was introduced earlier
was rejected by the committee at some
earlier occasion.
What this does basically is what the
Maryland Municipal League originally was
pressing for. That is to say, it sets up mu-
nicipalities completely independent of the
counties, and gives them independent power
directly from the General Assembly. This
is exactly what the Committee does not
want.
I do not mean to imply that this amend-
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ment was sparked by the recent internal
problems that you have read about in the
press and have heard about on the floor
of the Assembly here within the Maryland
Municipal League, but I do suggest that
this is precisely what they want.
I have just looked at this briefly, but
there are two major problems with it as
I see it.
In the first place, there is no veto al-
lowed a county over new incorporations. I
think what you could have here is a pro-
liferation of new municipalities, something1
not any of us want.
Secondly, there is absolutely no right in
the counties to give additional powers to
new municipalities or old municipalities,
as we provide in section 7.09.
I do not know whether it has fewer words
in it. It may possibly, but not only is it
not an improvement, I think that if this
amendment is adopted, there will probably
be some additional amendments coming in.
We probably can expect to be tied up in
the same process that the Committee itself
underwent for a period of about four days
trying to arrive at a provision which was
satisfactory to everybody.
I think this is what 7.07, 7.08 and 7.09
do, and I respectfully request that this
amendment be rejected.
DELEGATE JAMES: Mr. Chairman.
THE CHAIRMAN: Delegate James.
DELEGATE JAMES: I would like to
call the attention of the members to the
present law which vests in the counties
the veto over the creation of a municipality.
Certainly, this law will be continued by the
language of the proposed amendment, so
that the General Assembly would have the
power to define home rule.
First, there would be a constitutional
guarantee for charter. From that point on
it would be up to the General Assembly to
provide home rule powers by general law.
It seems to me this is a simple way to
handle it, simple from the constitutional
standpoint and eliminating this compli-
cated relationship which these provisions
attempt to set up.
THE CHAIRMAN: The Chair under-
stands that there are three other amend-
ments dealing with this same subject mat-
ter, one of them proposed to be offered by
Delegates Macdonald and Fox as an amend-
ment only to section 7.07; the other amend-
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