The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Chapter 12514, Laws of Florida 1927: the third charter of Avon Park

Avon Park was chartered three times in fourteen years. The Town of Avon Park was created by Chapter 6662 of 1913; the City of Avon Park by Chapter 10320 of 1925; and then, two years later, the city was abolished and created again by Chapter 12514 (No. 709), Laws of Florida 1927, approved 6 June 1927.[lof-1927-12514] This third charter is the one that mattered longest. It was still the city’s charter twenty-four years later, when the Florida Supreme Court had to read it to decide whether the Avon Park city council could throw out every ballot cast in the town’s Black voting place.[gough-1951]

It is read here in full, from the State Library of Florida’s scan of the session volume.

Why a third charter

The title says what it does:

AN ACT to Abolish the Present Municipal Government and Municipality of the City of Avon Park, Highlands County, Florida, and to Establish, Organize, and Incorporate a Municipality to Be Known as the City of Avon Park; to Define Its Territorial Boundaries; to Prescribe Its Powers and Privileges, and Provide for the Exercise of Same; and to Authorize the Imposition of Penalties for the Violation of Its Ordinances; and to Authorize It to Issue Bonds.[lof-1927-12514]

Sections 1 to 4 do the usual work of a re-charter: abolish the existing municipality outright, vest its property, taxes, claims, judgments and liens in the new one, carry every debt and contract over unimpaired, keep the sitting officers in their unexpired terms, and keep every existing ordinance in force unless it conflicts.[lof-1927-12514]

But section 3 carries a proviso that is the reason the act exists, and it is the clearest single statement of what the 1925 land boom did to Avon Park’s finances:

Provided, however, that the payment of all bonds issued by the municipality of the Town of Avon Park prior to January 1, A. D. 1926, shall be restricted to the property lying within the original limits of said municipality, and the property lying beyond said limits and now included within the limits of the municipality hereby created shall not be taxed for or required to pay any portion of said bonds issued by the municipality of the Town of Avon Park prior to the first day of January, A. D. 1926.[lof-1927-12514]

In 1925 the town of two and a quarter square miles had been enlarged into a city of a whole thirty-six-section township. The owners of the annexed land — groves, pasture and empty subdivision — were now being taxed to pay off debts contracted by a town they had never been part of. Section 3 walled the old town’s debt inside the old town’s boundary. It also fixes the effective date of the 1925 charter at 1 January 1926, which reconciles the statute with the “1926” that every popular account gives for the city’s founding.

The boundary, unchanged

Section 5 keeps the whole township:

Commencing at the Southwest corner of Township 33 S., Range 28 E.; thence running east along the south line of said township to the southeast corner thereof; thence north along the east line of said township to the northeast corner thereof; thence west along the north line of said township to the northwest corner thereof; thence south along the west line of said township to the southwest corner thereof, or point of beginning; said incorporate limits to include all of Sections 1 to 36, inclusive, in Township 33 S., Range 28 E.[lof-1927-12514]

Six years later the Legislature repealed and re-enacted this section by Chapter 16316 of 1933, in the middle of the bust.[lof-1933-16316]

How the city was to be governed

Section 7. A Mayor and a City Council of five members, all on two-year terms, all required to be legally qualified voters of the city, and — the provision that shaped every Avon Park election for the next quarter-century — the councilmen “shall be elected from the city at large until such time as the city shall be divided into wards.”[lof-1927-12514]

Section 9. The city “may be divided into four wards,” but only if the division is “submitted to the electorate of said city at a general election and approved by a majority vote of said electorate.”[lof-1927-12514] No evidence has been found that this was ever done. Avon Park therefore elected its whole council at large, and — as the Supreme Court found in 1951 — voted at a single polling place.[gough-1951] An at-large city with one polling place is a city where a minority of the electorate can decide a close race, and where a single polling place is the only place to contest it. Both facts matter to 1951.

Section 10 lists the officers: Mayor, five-member City Council, Superintendent of Public Works, Chief of Police, City Clerk and Collector, City Assessor, City Auditor and Comptroller, City Attorney, Chief of the Fire Department. Only the mayor and the council are elected by the people. Every one of the others “shall be elected by the City Council upon its organization and at its first regular meeting after the general election.”[lof-1927-12514]

That is worth holding on to. In September 1951 it was the City Clerk who appointed W. J. Robinson an inspector at Voting Place No. 2 — the appointment the council’s own answer called unlawful. Under this charter the City Clerk was not an independent officer with a mandate of his own. He was the council’s own appointee.[gough-1951]

Section 11 bars any officer or councilman from an interest in a city contract — with a long proviso exempting Avon Park’s banks, so that a banker could sit on the council and his bank still buy the city’s bonds.[lof-1927-12514]

Section 22 gives the Mayor a veto, overridable by a four-fifths vote of the council; requires every ordinance to be published “one time in a newspaper published in the City of Avon Park” or posted for thirty days; and then sets out the direct-democracy machinery: initiative on a petition of twenty-five per cent of the qualified electors, referendum, and recall on a petition “signed before the City Clerk, at the city hall, and not elsewhere, by registered voters of the said city in number equal to thirty per cent of the city registration.” A recall election had to be called within fifteen days.[lof-1927-12514] Avon Park used that recall provision in 1933.

Section 24, and the clause the Supreme Court cut down

Section 24 is the omnibus powers section: ordinances, nuisances, gambling, stock running at large, water works and lighting plants, franchises to street railways and telephone companies, speed limits, the dispersal of disorderly assemblies, hard labor on the streets for those who cannot pay their fines, the licensing of hawkers and jitney-buses. Buried in the middle of it, between a paragraph on licensing drays and a paragraph on confirming the Mayor’s appointments, sits one sentence:

All vacancies in terms occurring in City Council shall be filled by the vote of a majority of the remaining members of said City Council. Said City Council shall judge the election and return of its own members, and prescribe rules for the determination of contested election, and to prescribe rules and regulations for the government of its own members.[lof-1927-12514]

This is the clause on which the Avon Park city council rested its claim, on 25 September 1951, to declare all 397 ballots cast in Voting Place No. 2 “illegal and void.” The Supreme Court quoted it with an ellipsis — “Said City Council shall judge the election and return of its * * * members, and prescribed rules for the determination of contested election” — and held that the power went no further than the returns:

The Legislature was without authority to confer on the City Council of Avon Park judicial powers then vested in the Judicial Department of our government under the Constitution of Florida.[gough-1951]

Reading the act settles two small things about that quotation. The words the court replaced with asterisks are “own”; and where the reporter prints “prescribed rules,” the enrolled act prints “prescribe rules.” Neither changes the meaning, and both are the sort of slip the Secretary of State’s own certificate to this volume anticipates, warning that “the apparent omissions of words and inaccuracies of language appear in the Enrolled Bills.”[lof-1927-12514]

The election provisions — and a date that does not fit

Two short sections at the end of the act govern Avon Park’s elections, and between them they explain a great deal about 1951.

Sec. 59. The City Council shall by ordinance prescribe the rules and regulations under which all general and special City elections shall be held, which ordinance shall fix the qualifications of the voters therein.[lof-1927-12514]

The council fixed, by its own ordinance, who was qualified to vote in its own elections. There is no appeal, no state standard, and no limit written into the charter. Ordinance No. 12, whose section 19 allowed an election inspector to assist only a voter blind or without the use of his hands, and Ordinance No. 43, whose section 5 required every ballot to be accounted for — both of them argued over in 1951 — were made under this power.[gough-1951]

Sec. 60. A general City election for the election of a Mayor and five Councilmen shall be held in said City on the first Tuesday in December, A. D. 1927, and biennially on the first Tuesday in December thereafter. The officers elected in said City election shall take their respective offices on the first day of January following such election.[lof-1927-12514]

December. Yet Avon Park’s disputed election of 1951 was held on 11 September 1951, a Tuesday. The answer is Chapter 19691 of 1939, which rewrote this section to put the election on the second Tuesday in September, biennially, with the officers taking office on 1 October; the second Tuesday of September 1951 was the 11th. Chapter 57-1128 of 1957 then made the elections annual with staggered terms. Both are read in Reference: how Avon Park’s charter was amended, 1939 and 1957. The Supreme Court, which cites section 10 of this act as the authority for the September 1951 election, had no reason to remark on it.[gough-1951]

Sections 61 to 63 are severability, a general repealer, and an effective date on the Governor’s approval. Approved June 6, 1927.[lof-1927-12514]

The other four Avon Park acts of 1927

Chapter 12514 does not stand alone. The 1927 session passed five acts naming Avon Park, in one unbroken run of chapter numbers.

Chapter Approved What it does
12512 (H.B. 474) 7 May 1927 Validates $60,000 of city street improvement bonds dated 1 May 1927, sixty bonds of $1,000 at 6 per cent, maturing $6,000 a year for ten years from 1 May 1928, issued under Ordinance No. 127 passed 6 April 1927[lof-1927-12512]
12513 6 June 1927 Validates Ordinance No. 110, passed 9 June 1926 and approved by the Mayor on 10 June, and the special election of 20 July 1926 under it: $210,000 for a sanitary and storm sewerage system and disposal plant, $30,000 for a city hall, $115,000 for buying and improving parks — $355,000 in all[lof-1927-12513]
12514 6 June 1927 The charter, above[lof-1927-12514]
12515 26 May 1927 Repeals Chapter 6662 of 1913, the Town of Avon Park’s original charter, “and all amendments thereto,” and passes the town’s property and outstanding bonds to the city[lof-1927-12515]
12516 6 June 1927 Amends Chapter 12512 — the correction is a bank’s name: the $60,000 bonds are payable at the American Exchange Irving Trust Company of New York, not the “American Exchange Savings Trust Company” the earlier act had said[lof-1927-12516]

Two things stand out. The first is the money: in a single session the Legislature validated $415,000 of Avon Park borrowing for sewers, a city hall, parks and paving, for a town whose whole population in 1930 would be 3,355. The second is Chapter 12515. The Town of Avon Park had been abolished in 1925 and again in 1927, but its 1913 charter had never actually been taken off the books. It took the Legislature until 26 May 1927 to repeal it — and the repealing act says the town’s property passes to the city “as provided for in Chapter 10320, of the Laws of Florida,” the 1925 act, eleven days before that act was itself superseded.[lof-1927-12515]

Why this document matters beyond 1927

The charter of 1927 is the constitution under which Avon Park was governed through the bust, the Depression, the Second World War and into the civil rights era. Three episodes documented elsewhere run straight back to its text:

  • The bond default and the composition case that reached the Supreme Court of the United States in 1940 concerned debt issued under and validated alongside this act.
  • The recall election of 1933 used the thirty-per-cent machinery of section 22.
  • The election affair of 1951 turned entirely on section 24, and was possible in the first place because section 59 let the council write its own election rules and section 9’s ward division was never carried out.[gough-1951]

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 12514 (No. 709), Laws of Florida 1927, Special Acts: An Act to Abolish the Present Municipal Government and Municipality of the City of Avon Park, Highlands County, Florida, and to Establish, Organize, and Incorporate a Municipality to Be Known as the City of Avon Park (1927)
  2. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 12512 (No. 707), Laws of Florida 1927 (House Bill No. 474): An Act to Legalize and Validate Certain Bonds of the City of Avon Park, Florida (1927)
  3. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 12513 (No. 708), Laws of Florida 1927: An Act to Legalize and Validate Ordinance No. 110 of the City of Avon Park, Florida (1927)
  4. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 12515 (No. 710), Laws of Florida 1927: An Act to Repeal Chapter 6662, Laws of the State of Florida, and all amendments thereto (1927)
  5. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 12516 (No. 711), Laws of Florida 1927: An Act to Amend House Bill No. 474, Laws of Florida, Acts of 1927 (1927)
  6. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 16316 (No. 459), Laws of Florida 1933: An Act repealing and re-enacting Section 5 of Chapter 12514, Laws of Florida 1927 (1933)
  7. Supreme Court of Florida, Special Division B (Chapman, J.), Gough et al. v. State ex rel. Sauls et al., 55 So. 2d 111 (Fla. 1951) (1951)

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