Seaman v. Fedourich | Cases | Westlaw

On this appeal, here by permission of the Appellate Division, we deal with the validity of a districting plan for an elective legislative body below the state level.¹

The present action was, of course, prompted by recent Supreme Court cases holding that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that representation in both houses of a state's legislature be substantially proportionate to the number of people represented under the **782 principle of ‘one person, one vote.'⁴ There can be little doubt, and it is not disputed by the defendants, that that principle is applicable to elective legislative bodies exercising general governmental powers as the municipal level (cf. Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 575, 84 S.Ct. 1362, 12 L.Ed.2d 506; Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339, 81 S.Ct. 125, 5 L.Ed.2d 110), and such as been the conclusion reached by several courts called upon to consider the question.⁵

It is axiomatic that local governmental units are creations of, and exercise only those powers delegated to them by, the State (N.Y.Const., art. IX, ss 1, 2; Municipal Home Rule Law, ss 10, 11) and, certainly, if the latter may exercise its legislative powers only in a body constituted on a population basis, any general elective municipal organ to which it delegates certain of its powers must, by a parity of reasoning, be subjected to the *102 same constitutional requirement. Viewed in another way, if, as seems evident, the thrust of the Supreme Court's decisions is that it is inherent within the concept of ‘equal protection’ that a person has a substantial right to be heard and to participate, through his elected representatives, in the business of government on an equal basis with all other individuals, no reason or justification exists for differentiating, so far as that right is concerned, between the general governmental business carried on in the highest legislative organs of the State and that conducted, by virtue of a delegation of authority, in municipal law-making bodies. (See, generally, ***450 Weinstein, The Effect of the Federal Reapportionment Decisions on Counties and Other Forms of Municipal Government, 65 Col.L.Rev. 21.)

Nor can there be any question that the courts of New York, obliged as they are to uphold the Federal Constitution as well as this State's Constitution whose equal protection clause, we have said, is as broad in its overage as that of the Fourteenth Amendment (see Dorsey v. Stuyvesant Town Corp., 299 N.Y. 512, 530, 544, 87 N.E.2d 541, 548, 556, 14 A.L.R.2d 133) are vested with jurisdiction of actions brought to vindicate the right to equal representation. (See Matter of Orans, 15 N.Y.2d 339, 258 N.Y.S.2d 825, 206 N.E.2d 854; Maryland Committee for Fair Representation v. Tawes, 377 U.S. 656, 674, 84 S.Ct. 1429, 12 L.Ed.2d 575.)

The ‘overriding objective’ of any legislative apportionment (or districting) plan, the Supreme Court has made clear, ‘must be substantial equlity of population **783 among the various districts, so that the vote of any citizen is approximately equal in weight to that of any other citizen’. (Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 579, 84 S.Ct. 1362, 1390, supra.) In light of this objective, ‘the proper judicial approach’ in evaluating the constitutional validity of any particular plan, the court went on to say in a companion case to Reynolds, ‘is to ascertain whether, under the particular circumstances existing’ in the individual locality whose legislative scheme is in issue, ‘there has been a faithful adherence to a plan of population-based representation, with such minor deviations only as may occur in recognizing certain factors that are free from any taint of arbitrariness or discrimination’. (Roman v. Sincock, 377 U.S. 695, 710, 84 S.Ct. 1449, 1458). Judged in these terms, the Binghamton plan now before us may not withstand attack.

The disparties of population among the concilmanic districts created by the Local Law are, to some extent, more acute when the numerical size of those units is gauged by the 1960 census figures. To take but one example, district No. 7 (population: 15,808), under those calculations, contains over 100% more people than district No. 6 (population: 7,863). In our opinion, the courts below correctly held that (1) the lates official census is to be employed in determining population for districting purposes *104 and (2) the patients at the State Hospital are properly to be included (as they are in the 1960 Federal census) as part of the population of the district wherein that hospital is located.

A municipality may not devise its own method of calculating population as a basis for deriving a districting plan for its elective lawmaking body where the State has, by Constitution or statute, mandated that population be determined in a prescribed manner.⁶ In our view, New York **784 has adopted such a prescription. For instance, this State's Constitution (art. III, s 4) markes the latest Federal census ‘controlling as to the number of inhabitants in the state or any part thereof’ for purposes of State legislative apportionment, and numerous statutes likewise make that census the determinant whenever ‘population’ is a factor to be taken into account.⁷ Particularly significant is section 11 of the Optional City Government ***452 Law (L.1914, ch. 444, repealed L.1939, ch. 765 but ‘frozen’ as to city governments, such as Binghamton, adopted under its authority) which, in effect, requires that ‘the latest state census or United States census, whichever shall be later’, be employed to determine ‘the number of inhabitants of a city’ whenever such inquiry is pertinent to laws passed by the city's legislative body.