This is the state where people brag that they “buy local.” There’s a web site urging Vermonters to “think local,” and another touting the glories of being a “localvore,” eating mostly food grown or raised on farms right here in the Green Mountain State.
And then of course there is “local control,” a motto if not a mantra regularly invoked in political debate. Woe betide the governor or legislator who proposes some kind of statewide standard; he or she is certain to be greeted with a storm of protest against “top-down mandates,” against the very idea of those “distant” meddlers in Montpeculiar interfering with the right (perhaps divine) of the town – the government “closest to the people” – to decide what is best for it, against even the hint of violating the principle (perhaps divine) of “local control.”
For a few reasons, no one should ever have taken this nonsense seriously.
Reason one is that the history of “local control” is an ugly one. It was not so long ago that, in another part of the country, local control meant “don’t tell us what to do with our Nigras.” In Vermont, local control empowered each town to choose an “overseer of the poor” empowered to send the indigent to a town “poor farm,” and to post their names on a bulletin board. In practice, “local” has often turned to be a euphemism for bigoted, backward, and narrow-minded.
Like many other slogans, then, “local control” is part of the process fraud. Whenever someone says, “this is the best process,“ what he or she really means is, “this is the process more likely to produce the substantive result I prefer.” Those, for instance, who would “devolve” power to the states, have no qualms about pre-empting the power of the states where it suits them. Think the (now-obsolete, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court) Defense of Marriage Act or the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which limits the power of states and localities to regulate the construction of cell towers.
Besides, as a plain matter of law, Vermont is not a “local control” state.
So it was proclaimed – accurately – last week when the House Committee on Government Operations considered giving legislative approval to three proposed changes to their city charter that Burlington voters overwhelmingly approved two years ago. The changes would ban guns in bars, require gun owners with children to secure their weapons, and allow police to confiscate for five days the guns of people credibly accused of domestic violence.
“Vermont is not a local control state,” said Evan Hughes of the Vermont Federation of Sportsmens’ Clubs, who opposes the charter changes. “Vermont is a Dillon’s Rule state.”
Dillon’s rule?
Yup. As it turns out, Hughes is correct, even though the term was unfamiliar to several veteran members of the Legislature. That was Chief Justice John Forrest Dillon, not of Vermont but of the Iowa Supreme Court, who in a ruling in 1868 found that “municipal corporations owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from, the legislature.”
Most states are Dillon’s Rule rather than “home rule” states. Many combine the two. In California, for instance, the Rule does not apply to “Charter Cities,” meaning most large and middle-sized towns. But only 12 states – including Massachusetts and (Ironically?) Iowa – are not Dillon’s Rule states at all.
Vermont, said Karen Horn, the director of public Policy and advocacy for the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, is a strong Dillon’s Rule state, “one of the most centrally controlled states,” where “local control is kind of a myth.”
Which raises the question of how it became such a pervasive myth, with Vermonters regularly citing its virtues. One reason, Horn suggested, is “the tradition of town meeting, where voters actually get to vote on their municipal budget.”
Even there, she said, the “authority of town meeting has been eroded pretty steadily,” with the Legislature “providing municipalities with a never-ending supply of mandates.”
Were home rule really a guiding standard in Vermont, Burlington’s proposed charter changes would win easy approval. They were adopted on Town meeting Day in 2014 by large majorities of the voters, who, as Mayor Miro Weinberger told the House committee, “went to the polls amid a sea of yellow and black signs urging them to vote ‘no’ on the charter changes, and after weeks of vocal opposition from a well-financed ‘no’ campaign.”
Opponents argued that they had actually been shut out of the process in 2014. They appear to have a point. Some hearings were held in the afternoon, when fewer people could attend, and one city council member said in an email that one reason for this scheduling was to make it less likely that opponents of the gun control measures would appear.
But it is a very small point. They did appear. As Weinberger indicated, this was a very public process which the anti-gun control forces lost fair and square on the city level. They shouldn’t whine.
But some of them did display an admirable intellectual consistency, rare in the political realm these days. Evan Hughes said he would accept the consequence of the Dillon’s Rule regime even if he favored a local initiative that the state rejected. Mark Higley, the representative from Lowell, acknowledged that like most Northeast Kingdom Republicans he generally favored home rule, but only “when it doesn’t infringe on the rights of the citizens of the state.”
It might so infringe, Higley and other said, if, as one of the city ordinance requires, police confiscated for up to five days the guns of someone who was accused of domestic violence if law enforcement found “probably cause” to support the accusation, but without the person being convicted. Suppose in those five days the person needed to use those guns.
That’s a bit of a reach, if only because it would not happen very often. But it is a legitimate subject for debate. Less legitimate is the penchant of anti-gun control forces have to compare themselves with the civil rights heroes of the 1960s. Likening the plight of a guy unable to use his guns for five days (and only after a finding of probably cause that he had committed domestic violence) to decades of terrorism designed to prevent people from voting because of their race falls somewhere between silly and disgusting.
Meanwhile, Vermont remains in the thrall of Justice Dillon, forgotten though he may be. But there is an interesting historical footnote to his legacy.
He had a sister who married one John B. Jordan, a Davenport, Iowa, merchant. The Jordan’s daughter, Jennie, married a fellow named Louis Stengel. They had a son. They named him Charles, and to honor Jennie’s illustrious uncle, gave him the middle name of Dillon.
In an enterprise far nobler than law, government, or politics, Charles Dillon Stengel carved out an illustrious career of his own, one in which he was better known by his nickname: Casey.
