Ordinace Changing Residency Requirements

Residency rules that require a public employee to live within the jurisdiction have come and gone since the 1800s. The political machines of several American cities used similar requirements to give jobs to their friends and supporters in the late 1800s. As the progressive movement swept the country in the early 20th century, many jurisdictions did away with the requirement of having to live in the community to be hired, arguing that the best person for the job should be hired regardless of where they live as long as they moved to the community after they were hired. In the 1960s and 1970s, residency requirements made a comeback as many municipalities, mostly financially struggling cities, were looking to boost their economy and provide opportunities to minority residents. By the mid-1990s, almost all requirements fell out of favor as the middle-class increasingly moved to the suburbs and cities struggled to recruit good employees.

In the years of their revival, municipal employees and their union groups looked to the courts to strike down municipal residency requirements under the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution and under the recognized constitutional right to travel and move freely across jurisdictional lines. In their decisions, courts have had to decide the balance between the personal interests of public employees and the public interests of government and its citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court and various state courts have tended to uphold the constitutionality of the municipal residency requirements, generally siding with the public interests of government and its policy reasons for such requirements. Specifically, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that residency requirements do not infringe on an employee's constitutional right to travel and in effect has maintained that there is no constitutional right to government employment. While some decisions have placed specific limitations on residency requirements, the ability to impose those requirements has remained. 

The Governor, as part of the most recent State Budget, recommended prohibiting local units of government from passing ordinances or other policies which require residency within the jurisdiction of the local unit, unless as required by state law. The new approved State Budget disallows local units of government, except as required under state law, from instituting or enforcing residency requirements on current or prospective employees.

This ordinance brings the City into compliance with the new State law.