STATES & CITIES: New Machines

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The U. S. Constitution provides that states may make compacts or agreements with one another provided Congress ratifies them. Best example is the compact setting up the Port of New York Authority which links New York and New Jersey together with four bridges and the Holland Tunnel. As a State Senator, Mr. Toll served in the negotiations for the Colorado River Compact which was to divide water power and water rights from Boulder Dam among seven Western states. He soon learned that states seldom agree, because they have no machinery for negotiation. The Colorado River Com pact was ten years in the making. The negotiators were unofficial representatives; their tentative agreements were often repudiated by their governors or their legislatures; when negotiations were begun again a new set of unofficial representatives would appear and all discussion had to start again from the beginning.

The Council of State Governments undertook to remedy this situation. Its proposal was that each state should by law create a Commission on Interstate Cooperation. Each state commission was to consist of three parts: five executive officials representing the Governor; five state Senators; five state Representatives. The ten legislators were to form standing committees on interstate cooperation, to which all bills for such co-operation are automatically referred. Thus the negotiators of compacts or understandings for uniform laws are responsible for them in committee and on the floor, and thus the Governor through his appointees is committed to them in advance, thus dozens of hitches are eliminated.

In March 1935, New Jersey became the first State to pass such a law. Year ago, when the first General Assembly of Commissions on Interstate Co-operation was held, New Jersey and Colorado were its only members. Last week the second General Assembly found 14 states with such Commissions, all of them, except Colorado and Nebraska, from east of the Mississippi. In addition, twelve other states which have not yet formally adopted the plan have standing committees on interstate co-operation in one or both houses of their legislatures. Seven other interested states sent delegates to last week's convention.

Already in the few months that such commissions have existed they have gone quietly to work. Most active have been the commissions of the three adjoining States of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, which have had no less than ten meetings since last November on labor compacts, anti-crime measures, highway safety, milk control, stream pollution and water supply, relief for jobless transients, use of the waters of the Delaware River basin. No noteworthy compacts have yet been made, but legislative programs have been worked out and the wheels of co-operation have been started turning.

Said Mr. Toll to the delegates who assembled in Chicago: "There is only one way in which we can reduce this pressure for centralization [of government], and that is by devising effective machinery through which the state governments can engage in a constructive and aggressive campaign of co-operation for better, modern integral government."

His sentiments were echoed with approval by Franklin Roosevelt's uncle, Frederick A. Delano, who, as chairman of the President's Committee on National Resources, was there to lend the meeting his advice.