I. Standpoint
I am not a Virgin Islander. I am an American researcher who has visited all three main islands, who was driven past the Julius E. Sprauve School and the Myrah Keating Smith clinic by a St. John taxi driver who wanted a visitor to see the contrast between them and the rebuilt private houses nearby, and who has since spent time in the documentary record trying to understand what he was showing me.
That standpoint has a known bias and I would rather name it than pretend otherwise. My informants were people accessible to a curious tourist: drivers, guides, shopkeepers. They have island-wide mobility, daily practice at explaining the place to outsiders, and no institutional position to protect. The bias therefore runs toward candor and against official framing. They are also, by definition, the articulate constituency — the people most likely to have views on governance and least likely to be representative of the median voter. A March 2026 study out of the University of Michigan found broad public support for the Sixth Constitutional Convention alongside limited public awareness of it, which suggests the gap between my informants and the general electorate is wide.
What an outsider can offer is comparison. What he cannot offer is standing. Readers should weigh both.
II. What a Territorial Constitution Can and Cannot Reach
The Virgin Islands is governed under the Revised Organic Act of 1954, a federal statute now running to about 105 pages. Only Congress can amend it. Once the territory has a constitution of its own, it gains the power to amend that document. That difference — between a charter you can change and one you cannot — is the whole practical case for a constitution, independent of status. St. Thomas Source
Congress authorized the process in 1976, empowering the legislatures of the Virgin Islands and Guam to call conventions to draft, within the existing territorial-federal relationship, constitutions for local self-government. The phrase does the constraining. A territorial constitution may reorganize the internal machinery of government. It may not alter status, and it may not sit uneasily with federal supremacy. The president of the Fifth Convention said so plainly: the proposed constitution would not affect the territory’s standing as a non-self-governing territory, and would only organize existing internal governance arrangements. ConconWikipedia
This is the structural fact that has shaped fifty years of failure, and it also indicates where a convention’s real power lies. If a convention cannot touch the vertical relationship with Washington, the one thing fully within its reach is the vertical relationship inside the territory: whether the Virgin Islands is governed as one undifferentiated unit, or as a territory containing places with governments of their own.
That is the subject of this paper, and it is the subject on which the record of five conventions is thinnest.
III. The Record: Sixty-Two Years, Five Conventions, No Constitution
Conventions were elected in 1964, 1971, 1977, and 1980, and none adopted a constitution that took effect. Voters rejected the third convention’s draft in a 1979 referendum and the fourth convention’s draft in 1981. The fifth convention, elected in 2007, produced a draft but failed to agree on a final document by 2012 and was dissolved. WikipediaWikipedia
The Fifth Convention’s collapse is the best-documented and the most instructive. Its 2009 draft drew a federal review identifying nine problem areas, including the absence of express recognition of United States sovereignty and the supremacy of federal law, provisions for a special election on status, provisions conferring legal advantages on groups defined by place and timing of birth or by ancestry, residence requirements for certain offices, provisions guaranteeing legislative representation of certain geographic areas, provisions on territorial waters and marine resources, and imprecise language in the bill of rights. The most publicized was a property tax exemption for ancestral Virgin Islanders, defined by family presence in the territory in or before 1932. GovInfoVirgin Islands Consortium
Two features of that list deserve emphasis because they recur. First, several of the objections concern who counts as a Virgin Islander — a question that arises with unusual force precisely because there is no smaller unit in which belonging can be expressed. Second, one objection concerned guaranteed geographic representation, which is the local-government question wearing legislative clothes.
The plainest summary of the record is the one a local commentator offered in 2022: all five attempts were rejected either by Congress for clashes with federal law, or by Virgin Islands voters, or by both. St. Thomas Source
IV. The Absent Layer
The United States Virgin Islands has no municipal governments. There are no incorporated cities or towns, no mayors, no town councils, no municipal budgets or municipal procurement. Charlotte Amalie, Christiansted, Frederiksted, and Cruz Bay are place names, not jurisdictions. St. John, an island of roughly five thousand residents, has no government of its own at any level. As one Daily News commentator put it in March 2025, the territory has no local governments and is not structured politically for its towns to thrive or for citizens to have a say in the quality of life in the communities where they live. Virgin Islands Daily News
This is not the normal condition of a U.S. jurisdiction, and it is not the condition of the comparable territories. Puerto Rico has seventy-eight municipios, each with an elected mayor and a municipal assembly, which is the principal reason Puerto Rico has a deep bench of officeholders and a working ladder from local office upward. Guam has nineteen villages with elected mayors, and though those mayors sit within the territorial government rather than heading separate corporations, they constitute an identifiable local office with a constituency and a name on a ballot.
It is also not the historic condition of the Virgin Islands. The 1936 Organic Act established municipal councils, and the Revised Organic Act of 1954 consolidated the territory under a single unicameral legislature. The word used by advocates today is re-establishing, not establishing, and the word is accurate.
The consequence is that every function that would elsewhere be municipal — schools, clinics, roads, refuse, permitting, capital projects — is territorial. It is executed by agencies headquartered on another island, competing against every other project in the territory, with no officeholder anywhere whose responsibilities are confined to one place and whose position depends on that place’s outcomes.
V. What the Conventions Have Done With It
Very little, and that is the finding.
The Fifth Convention’s draft contained something, but thin. A local account describes it as an inadequate provision for a future Senate to approve one local government per island — that is, an enabling clause deferring the entire question to the very legislature whose powers a local layer would diminish, and doing so at the granularity of the island rather than the town. The same commentator argues that Christiansted and Frederiksted each deserve a local government of its own, and calls on town leaders across the territory to petition the Sixth Convention, the governor, and the Senate both for inclusion in the constitution and for enabling legislation under the Revised Organic Act authorizing a Municipal Corporations Act. Virgin Islands Daily NewsVirgin Islands Daily News
Two design points follow from that formulation and are worth stating precisely, because they will determine whether any provision in the Sixth Convention’s draft has force:
Permissive versus self-executing. A clause that permits the legislature to create local governments creates nothing. Fifty years of the same structure at the federal level should have taught the lesson: an authorization that a conflicted body may decline to use is not a grant of power. A self-executing provision — one that establishes named units, or that establishes a petition-and-referendum process by which residents may incorporate without legislative consent — is a different instrument entirely.
Island versus town. One local government per island treats St. Croix as a single community, which nobody who has been to both Christiansted and Frederiksted believes. It also produces a strange result on St. John, where an island-level government would be the more sensible unit, and on St. Thomas, where it would not. A constitution can accommodate both by authorizing incorporation on petition rather than by fixing units in the text.
To be clear about the limits of this paper: the Sixth Convention’s full draft is not publicly available in final form, and I have not seen its local-government article. Nothing here should be read as a characterization of language I have not read. What follows is what the public record shows about the process that will produce it.
VI. The Sixth Convention: Where Things Stand
Voters called this convention in November 2020, approving the referendum by 71.92 percent — 7,275 yes to 2,840 no, with 10,115 of the 18,130 ballots cast registering an opinion. The enabling act was signed in January 2023, delegates were elected in November 2024, and the convention convened on January 27, 2025. ConconConcon
The original schedule required a draft by October 2025 and a ratification vote in November 2026. In late October 2025 the convention’s president testified before the legislature requesting a delay and additional funding, which the legislature granted. The current dates are a draft constitution due February 27, 2027, and a territory-wide ratification vote on July 3, 2027. An initial draft was completed in the interim: work concluded January 30, 2026, followed by a plenary session and referral to legal counsel.The convention’s paid constitutional adviser, Professor Richard Albert of the University of Texas, reviewed the draft in May 2026, urging delegates to simplify the language and to attend to provisions flagged for federal objection, warning that federal supremacy is not optional and must be reflected throughout rather than in a single closing clause. He also observed that the drafts were more ambitious than any state constitution. Concon + 3
The process has drawn sustained criticism on transparency and on legislative capture. The most persistent critic, J.H. Snider of the USVI Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse, argues that the enabling act embeds legislative control through several devices, among them requiring the convention to use the legislature’s and governor’s legal staff as counsel, making delegates apply to the legislature for operating funds, directing $150,000 — half the convention’s budget — to a public relations campaign for ratification, and establishing large multi-member delegate districts that suppress minority representation. The Clearinghouse also records that as of May 2026, roughly fifteen months after convening, the convention had spent negligible time on its amendment article, and refused to share the draft article publicly at the meeting where it was discussed. Zócalo Public SquareConcon
Running alongside all of this is a congressional alternative: in April 2023 the territory’s delegate introduced H.R. 3026 to adopt the Revised Organic Act itself as the constitution of the Virgin Islands, with amendments proposable by a two-thirds resolution of the territorial legislature. That route would deliver amendability while foreclosing any bypass of the legislature — and, relevant here, would carry forward the 1954 structure with its absent local layer intact. Concon
VII. The Diagnostic Case: St. John’s Delegate Seat
If one wanted a single piece of evidence that the territory lacks a mechanism for places to defend themselves, it is this.
The original enabling act gave St. John a dedicated seat at the convention. In February 2024 the legislature quietly informed the elections office that it intended to convert that seat to an at-large seat, and on March 25, 2024 it passed the amendment doing so, as part of a bill principally concerned with leave and compensation for government employees running as delegates. The Clearinghouse’s editor adds an observation worth sitting with: it is surprising that St. John residents did not complain publicly about this loss of voting power. ConconConcon
I would suggest it is not surprising at all. Complaint requires a complainant with standing, and St. John has no body whose job it is to speak for St. John. There is no mayor to hold a press conference, no council to pass a resolution, no administrator whose position obliges him to notice. The removal of the seat and the silence that followed are the same fact stated twice.
The delegate election results compound the point. Among the seven delegates elected from the St. Thomas–St. John district, the last three were seated with 91, 80, and 31 votes respectively. Whatever else that indicates, it does not indicate a district with dense civic infrastructure at the sub-territorial level. Concon
VIII. The Test of Consequence
The abstract argument for a local layer is that it distributes attention. The concrete argument is available on St. John and can be checked by anyone.
Sprauve School students have attended classes in modular units since 2018, in structures designed to last five years. In August 2025 the Coastal Zone Management Commission approved federal consistency for a replacement facility at Catherineberg for up to 550 students, pre-K through grade 12, which would end the requirement that St. John high schoolers ferry to St. Thomas. As of July 2026, the design has FEMA approval and the government is finalizing a land purchase for a ball field. Construction has not begun. That is nine years after Hurricanes Irma and Maria. St. Thomas Source + 2
The clinic is further behind. FEMA approved replacement in 2021, a $1.5 million design contract was executed that September, and restoration was anticipated to begin in summer 2022 and be finished by December 2024. Instead, an eight-month preconstruction contract was executed in October 2025, with construction expected to take about two years once a notice to proceed issues. Earliest completion is around 2028 — eleven years, for the only health facility on an island of five thousand people. UsviodrUsviodr
The honest explanation is not that anyone is idle. Federal disaster funding carries damage assessment, repair-versus-replace justification, environmental and coastal review, and compliant procurement, each with a federal reviewer able to return the file. The question is why that sequence takes nine years here. Part of the answer is that a private owner rebuilding with insurance proceeds has one decision-maker and no procurement rules. The rest of the answer is that St. John’s school belongs to a territorial department, its clinic to a hospital corporation on St. Thomas, and both queue through a territorial recovery office alongside every project on St. Croix and St. Thomas. Nobody in that chain works only on St. John.
This is the case a local-government article in the constitution would have to answer. Not “should towns have a voice” but: would a Cruz Bay or St. John municipal corporation, with its own capital budget and standing as a subrecipient, have gotten the school built faster? That is an empirical question, it is contestable, and it deserves to be argued on the record before July 2027 rather than after.
IX. Objections Worth Taking Seriously
Cost and duplication. A territory of about 87,000 people already supports a governor, a fifteen-member legislature, a judiciary, and a large agency apparatus. Adding municipalities adds payroll. The reply is that the layer need not be expensive to be useful — a municipality with planning, permitting, refuse, and capital-project standing, without independent police or courts, is a modest institution — but the objection is real and any proposal that ignores it will fail.
Fiscal capacity. Municipalities without revenue are advisory bodies with letterhead. A serious provision has to address taxing authority or dedicated revenue sharing, and both raise questions about St. John’s tourism base relative to St. Croix’s.
Federal review. Given that the Fifth Convention’s draft drew objections on guaranteed geographic representation, a drafter should expect any provision allocating power by place to be examined closely. A general incorporation power is more defensible than named guarantees. GovInfo
Sequencing. Some argue the territory should settle status first. The counterargument, and I think the stronger one, is that status has been unsettled for a century and the school has been modular for eight years. Amendability and local capacity are useful under any status outcome.
X. What to Watch
For anyone following this between now and July 2027, the questions that will tell you whether the local-government issue has been treated seriously are narrow and answerable:
- Does the draft contain a local-government article at all, and is it self-executing or merely permissive?
- Does it operate at the island level or permit town incorporation?
- Does it address municipal revenue, or create bodies without money?
- Does incorporation require legislative consent, or can residents initiate by petition and referendum?
- Does the draft become publicly available in full with enough time before the referendum for the question to be debated?
That last one is not a formality. A convention that will not release its amendment article is unlikely to invite argument about its local-government article, and a provision nobody has read cannot be improved before it is voted on.
XI. Conclusion
The Virgin Islands has spent sixty-two years and six conventions on a document it cannot get, largely because the instrument Congress offers cannot reach the question most people care about. That is a genuine grievance and it is not the territory’s fault.
But it has produced a habit of treating the constitution as being about the vertical relationship with Washington, when the one thing a territorial constitution unambiguously can do is restructure the vertical relationship inside the territory. Local government is the piece of self-determination available right now, without congressional permission on status, without a fight over ancestry provisions, and without waiting for anyone in Washington to act.
The absence of that layer is not an abstraction. It is a delegate seat removed without protest, a school in temporary buildings for eight years, and a clinic that will have taken eleven. A place with no government of its own has no one whose job it is to be angry on its behalf. That is what a constitution could fix, and this is the last chance for a generation to fix it.
