Voters in Ohio made national news on Election Day this year when they passed an amendment to their state constitution assuring “an individual right to one’s own reproductive medical treatment, including but not limited to abortion and create legal protections for any person or entity that assists a person with receiving reproductive medical treatment, including but not limited to abortion ...”

On the same Election Day, we New Yorkers passed two amendments to our state constitution, one that “removed small-city school districts from special constitutional debt limitation” and another that “extended sewage project debt exclusion from the debt limit.”

People don’t spend much time thinking about state constitutions. Many don’t even know they exist. But if you do stop and look at this comparison, the difference is stark. The subject of the Ohio vote seemed to be about what’s usually understood to be “constitutional” by those who pay attention: Basic law. Core social values. Limits on government. The New York questions, in contrast, seem to be about slight changes in a few sentences in the state’s finance law. Why isn’t this handled as part of the routine work of the state legislature?

The answer, as you likely guessed, is political. New York has had four constitutions. The current one, adopted in 1898, contains 49,360 words and has been amended 231 times. (Another 79 proposed amendments were rejected during the following century and a quarter.) In contrast the U.S. Constitution, in place since 1789, is 4,543 words long and has been amended 27 times.

New York’s constitutions were written in conventions specially called for this purpose and ratified by popular vote. Amendments have also been initiated at conventions, but more usually have been advanced through the legislature. Unlike people in Ohio and 18 other states, we New Yorkers don’t have the power to change our constitution through a referendum process. In sum, constitutional provisions are put in place by the dominant political forces of the time, solving the most pressing problems of government, but also entrenching their values, priorities, and preferred institutional arrangements, and further embedding themselves in power. The result is long, detailed non-constitutional constitutions that reach into the nooks and crannies of state and local government.

Time passes. Some of the premises underlying those detailed provisions lose their validity. Small cities are no longer the locus of greater wealth than their rural neighbors, with their school districts therefore reasonably subject to greater borrowing limits as a percentage of their property tax base than are their rural neighbors. But it’s not through ordinary legislative action that adjustments may be made to permit needed policy responses. The limits are in the constitution. Constitutional amendment is required to modify or remove them. The whole state must vote to affect a remedy. The 5,131,572 registered voters in New York City have a say, a determining say if they want it, in a matter of no importance to them but critically important to those of us in Ulster County reliant for our children’s education on the Kingston City School District.

It came out OK this time. Both amendments passed. But the immediate relief provided by successful outcomes should not be allowed to obscure that non-constitutional constitutions are a formula for bad government, and an argument for taking a comprehensive look at the need for state constitutional change.

The author is a former professor and dean at SUNY New Paltz and chaired the county's Charter Revision Commission, among many other accomplishments. To read more about him, click here.