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REAPPORTIONMENT OF THE VERMONT HOUSE - 1965

The longest and most emotional battle ever fought in Vermont was over the apportionment of the House. The framers created a system in which each town had one vote in the House. Population was irrelevant; the lone representative from the state's largest city had the same vote as the member from its smallest town. It was a system that favored small towns and rural interests, but one that seemed at odds with the principles of a representative government.

Many people made efforts to change the system: In 1849 the state Council of Censors condemned the one town-one vote method, saying it "is unequal and at war with the principles of representative governments - it is anomalous - being based upon territory independent of population like that of no other state in the Union."

Nearly a century later a minority report of a commission created to amend the state Constitution also criticized the system of apportioning House members as unrepresentative. "By representative government is not meant the representation of rocks and scenery but the representation of people," the report said.

But it took a 1962 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court and repeated orders from a panel of federal judges to force change. In 1965 the 246 lawmakers, working in the so-called suicide Legislature, created a new 150-member House with districts based on population.

"Vermont ceased to be Vermont," said Emory Hebard of Glover, who chaired the special committee on reapportionment and went on to become state treasurer. "To this day," he said in 1989, "I feel it is one of the worst things we did to the state of Vermont. We really lost something." "There was a very, very dramatic change," recalled Vic Maerki, then a State House reporter for the Burlington Free Press. "Following reapportionment the Legislature clearly was more activist.

There was a sense when the new Legislature came in that they represented the new Vermont."

Richard Mallary, who served as speaker of the reapportioned House, said the 1966 session "was very different. The dominance of the old-timers, small-towners was gone. We had lots of people there who viewed this as being a major watershed in the state and they were going to come there and change the world. There was a sense that anything was possible."