Last week, Missourians voted to require Kansas City to spend 25% of its general revenue on police. It’s the most recent salvo in the one-sided war of red-state legislators attacking the autonomy of blue cities within their bounds.
Since the 1950s, Kansas City has been required to spend at least 20% of its general revenue on police, and police spending often exceeded that requirement. Kansas City is the only municipality in Missouri where that spending requirement is fixed by law, as Kansas City doesn’t get to control its own police department. Under Missouri law, the KCPD is under the control of a five-member board of police commissioners, and four of those are appointed by the governor, with the fifth seat going to Kansas City’s mayor. This setup is a racist holdover from the Civil War era, designed to increase the power of rural white communities over a city with a higher Black and liberal population.
After the murder of George Floyd ignited nationwide protests, Kansas City’s city council tried to shift $42 million of police funding toward measures designed to increase police accountability, including community engagement, outreach, and prevention. That $42 million was above and beyond the amount the city was required to spend. Conservatives howled that this was defunding the police, and GOP state legislators responded by putting a measure on the ballot to force Kansas City to spend 25%, rather than 20%, of all general revenue on police each year.
This allowed the entire state to vote on what Kansas City is allowed to do with its own revenue. No other Missouri city has a police department subject to this level of state oversight. It beggars belief to think legislators and rural residents would sit still if the blue denizens of Kansas City were allowed to dictate how the conservative citizens of Joplin or Branson should spend their local tax dollars.
Kansas City isn’t alone. This tactic has lately been a favorite of red states. Tennessee has taken a similar approach to Missouri when faced with a blue city responding to police violence. After Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was beaten to death by multiple police officers in 2023 after a traffic stop, the Memphis City Council passed an ordinance banning pretextual traffic stops. A pretextual stop is one where an officer stops a vehicle based on the pretext of a minor traffic infraction, such as a broken tail light, when the real goal is to conduct a search. The GOP-controlled state legislature then promptly passed a law prohibiting the ban.
Surprising no one, Texas has been at the forefront of this behavior. Last year, the state passed a law that blocked local rules in Austin and Dallas requiring companies to provide 10-minute water and sun breaks to construction workers every four hours. The law also bars any other cities from passing similar ordinances in the future. Texas was already the state with the most heat-related on-the-job deaths since 2011, but the state’s conservatives say the real issue is that having differing local ordinances about water breaks is tough on businesses.
“We are going to have one regulatory regime across the entire state on massive subject areas that will make the cost of business even lower, the ease of business even better,” Gov. Greg Abbott said, justifying the move.
Of course, if the concern is a patchwork of regulations, the state could solve it by passing statewide water-break laws, but this state is not interested in worker safety.
In the same law, the Texas legislature also blocked local paid sick leave ordinances and stopped cities from passing laws protecting tenants from eviction. The law is so broad it blocks cities from passing protections greater than those provided for by the state in agriculture, business, finance, insurance, labor, and natural resources. Any person or company that believes they are harmed by a local ordinance can sue, but the law is written so haphazardly that cities may not know what local rules violate the law until they are dragged into court by businesses opposing the law.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shepherded a similar measure through his state’s legislature. Now, if an ordinance is challenged as “arbitrary or unreasonable,” the local government has to suspend enforcement while the challenge proceeds. Successful challenges can net plaintiffs up to $50,000 in fees and costs. Only businesses can sue, and even if the business loses in court, the local government still must keep the law suspended for another 45 days.
State Rep. Robbie Brackett, a Republican who sponsored the bill, said that “it allows the stakeholders of that community a vehicle to take action and stand against local governments that go too far.”
Stakeholders in a community should take a stand against their local government by helping to elect different candidates, not by allowing disgruntled businesses to sue over any laws they don’t like.
Meanwhile, Ohio is busy chipping away at its constitutional grant of home rule, which allows cities to adopt police and sanitary laws, including those regulating public health, that do not conflict with general state law. But after several cities, including Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, proposed or passed laws prohibiting the sale of flavored tobacco products, the GOP-controlled legislature passed a budget measure stripping tobacco regulation from cities, despite that regulating tobacco is most definitely regulating public health.
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode the veto. And in May, an Ohio state court judge found the law unconstitutionally violated home rule, but the state has appealed. Imagine being willing to gut the constitutional principle of local control, which has been in effect in Ohio since 1912, just to make it easier for companies to target underage smokers, who are more likely to use flavored tobacco products.
These actions are objectively anti-democratic. They take power away from the elected officials most directly accountable to a city’s citizens and shift it to the state government. It’s precisely the thing conservatives claim to loathe the federal government for, with their supposed belief in states' rights and small government. But ultimately, what modern conservatives really believe in is states’ rights and local control for me but not for thee.
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