Preisler v. Mayor of St. Louis

303 F. Supp. 1071, 1969 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10379
CourtDistrict Court, E.D. Missouri
DecidedJune 30, 1969
DocketNo. 68C 338(2)
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 303 F. Supp. 1071 (Preisler v. Mayor of St. Louis) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, E.D. Missouri primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Preisler v. Mayor of St. Louis, 303 F. Supp. 1071, 1969 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10379 (E.D. Mo. 1969).

Opinion

MEMORANDUM

MEREDITH, District Judge.

The plaintiffs are six registered voters of the City of St. Louis, Missouri. They brought this suit, individually and in behalf of others similarly situated, against the Mayor of the City of St. Louis, the President of the Board of Aldermen of the City of St. Louis, the members of the Board of Aldermen of the City of St. Louis, and the Board of Election Commissioners of the City of St. Louis. The plaintiffs seek a declaratory judgment that the manner in which the twenty-eight wards of the City of St. Louis are divided for the purpose of aldermanic representation, and whose boundaries are created by Ordinances Nos. 53564 and 54404 of the City of St. Louis, violates the equal protection clause of the [1073]*1073Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The plaintiffs also request injunctive relief prohibiting future elections under these ordinances, and that the Court retain jurisdiction until such time as the ward boundaries are drawn in accordance with the United States Constitution.

This Court has jurisdiction under the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 1343(3) and 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 and 1988. The ordinances sought to be declared unconstitutional are part of the Charter of the City of St. Louis, which was approved by the 1945 Constitution of the State of Missouri, V.A.M.S. (Article 6, Section 31). The Charter is of local and not statewide application. A three-judge court under the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 2281 is not required. See Moody v. Flowers, 387 U.S. 97, 87 S.Ct. 1544, 18 L.Ed.2d 643 (1967), and Dusch v. Davis, 387 U.S. 112, 87 S.Ct. 1554, 18 L.Ed.2d 656 (1967).

The City of St. Louis is divided into twenty-eight wards which elect one aider-man each to the Board of Aldermen. The President of the Board of Aldermen is elected at large. The legislative power of the City of St. Louis is vested in this Board. See Charter of City of St. Louis, August 29, 1914, as amended, Article IV, Section 1. The twenty-eight wards are created by Article I, Section 3, of the Charter. That section provides:

“WARDS — The city is hereby divided into twenty-eight wards, bounded and numbered as the wards of the city now are, provided, that from time to time corrected ward boundaries may be established by ordinance which shall comprise, as nearly as practicable, compact and contiguous territory within straight lines, and contain as nearly as may be the same number of registered voters.”

The ward boundaries as they presently exist were drawn by Ordinance 53564, June 30, 1965, and Ordinance 54404, November 10, 1966.

The plaintiffs contend that the present apportionment of the aldermanic wards creates an invidious discrimination and vote debasement as between citizens of various wards. They urge that the only constitutionally permissible basis for apportionment is equal population. The defendants contend that registered voters are a proper criterion upon which ward boundaries may be drawn in St. Louis.

The Supreme Court of the State of Missouri and the Supreme Court of the United States have clearly held that the principle of one man, one vote enunciated in Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1, 84 S.Ct. 526, 11 L.Ed.2d 481 (1964), and in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 84 S.Ct. 1362,12L.Ed.2d 506 (1964), is applicable to units of local government. Avery v. Midland County, 390 U.S. 474, 88 S.Ct. 1114, 20 L.Ed.2d 45 (1968); and Armentrout v. Schooler, 409 S.W.2d 138 (Mo.1966). The Supreme Court of the State of Missouri applied these principles to councilmen elected from disproportionate wards in a third-class city in Armentrout v. Schooler, supra. In that case the Court said:

“Since the members of the City Council * * * are elected by the people in a representative capacity, and perform primarily legislative functions importantly affecting the people, the wards from which they are elected must be substantially equal in population, under the equal protection of the laws clauses of the constitutions of the United States and of the State of Missouri.”

The United States Supreme Court has consistently held that the controlling criterion in apportionment controversies is that the Constitution permits no substantial variation from equal population as a basis for districting legislative bodies. See Kirkpatrick v. Preisler, 394 U.S. 526, 89 S.Ct. 1225, 22 L.Ed.2d 519 (1969); Avery v. Midland County, supra; Reynolds v. Sims, supra; WMCA, Inc. v. Lomenzo, 377 U.S. 633, 84 S.Ct. 1418, 12 L.Ed.2d 568 (1964); Maryland Committee v. Tawes, 377 U.S. 656, 84 S.Ct. 1429, 12 L.Ed.2d 595 (1964) ; Davis v. Mann, 377 U.S. 678, 84 S.Ct. 1441, 12 L. Ed.2d 609 (1964); and Roman v. Sincock, [1074]*1074377 U.S. 695, 84 S.Ct. 1449, 12 L.Ed.2d 620 (1964).

The above decisions, while establishing “equal population” as a basis for apportionment, do not define what the Supreme Court means by population. This was brought out by the Court in Burns v. Richardson, 384 U.S. 73, 91, 86 S.Ct. 1286, 1296, 16 L.Ed.2d 376 (1966) :

“We start with the proposition that the Equal Protection Clause does not require the States to use total population figures derived from the federal census as the standard by which this substantial population equivalency is to be measured. Although total population figures were in fact the basis of comparison in that case [Reynolds v. Sims) and most of the others decided that day, our discussion carefully left open the question what population was being referred to. At several points, we discussed substantial equivalence in terms of voter population or citizen population, making no distinction between the acceptability of such a test and a test based on total population.”

The Supreme Court in Burns v. Richardson approved a temporary apportionment of the Hawaii House of Representatives on the basis of registered voters. It was pointed out that the decision was not an approval of registered voters as a basis for apportionment other than as an interim basis under the particular facts of that case. The use of registered voters was approved “only because on this record it was found to have produced a distribution of legislators not substantially different from that which would have resulted from the use of a permissible population basis.” Burns v. Richardson, supra, at 93, 86 S.Ct. at 1297.

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Bluebook (online)
303 F. Supp. 1071, 1969 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10379, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/preisler-v-mayor-of-st-louis-moed-1969.