Title: In re Referendum Petition to Repeal Ordinance 04-75

State: new-jersey

Issuer: New Jersey Supreme Court

Document:

SUPREME COURT OF NEW JERSEY A- 94 September Term 2006 IN RE REFERENDUM PETITION TO REPEAL ORDINANCE 04-75. Argued May 1, 2007 Decided September 26, 2007 On certification to the Superior Court, Appellate Division, whose opinion is reported at 388 N.J. Super. 405 (2006). Rocky L. Peterson argued the cause for appellants, The Honorable Mayor Douglas Palmer of the City of Trenton and The City Council of the City of Trenton (Hill Wallack, attorneys; Mr. Peterson, Patrick D. Kennedy, Megan McGeehin Schwartz and Ryan P. Kennedy, on the briefs). George T. Dougherty argued the cause for respondents, Russell Derricott and the Committee of Protest Petitioners (Katz & Dougherty, attorneys). JUSTICE ALBIN delivered the opinion of the Court. The Legislature has conferred on the voters of Faulkner Act municipalities, See footnote 1 such as Trenton, the power of referendum, the right to test a challenged ordinance in the crucible of the democratic process. See N.J.S.A. 40:69A-185. When a referendum petition is properly filed, the voters have the final say in approving or rejecting an ordinance at the ballot box. In this case, the Trenton City Council enacted Ordinance 04-75, which established a new organizational table for the police department and set a salary range for the chief of administrative services. A Trenton citizens group filed a referendum petition that required the ordinance to be submitted for ballot approval. The City Council and the Mayor of Trenton then filed a complaint seeking a declaratory judgment that the ordinance was not subject to referendum pursuant to N.J.S.A. 40:69A-185. Relying on case law that holds that only legislative ordinances, as opposed to administrative ordinances, are subject to referendum, the trial court concluded that the part of the ordinance restructuring the police department was administrative in nature and therefore not subject to the referendum statute. The Appellate Division reversed, finding it to be legislative and subject to voter approval in a referendum. We affirm, not because Trenton Ordinance 04-75 is a legislative as opposed to administrative ordinance, but because N.J.S.A. 40:69A-185 states in clear, plain language that any ordinance passed by the council, challenged by a properly filed referendum petition, must be approved or rejected at the polls. The judicially-created legislative/administrative distinction is not supported by the statute, its legislative history, or its place in the overall statutory scheme. Only the Legislature can make exceptions to the statutory mandate that any ordinance is subject to referendum. Because there is no applicable statutory exception, Ordinance 04-75 is subject to the referendum process and must be placed on the ballot for voter review. A. [Id. at 414 (quoting Menendez, supra, 211 N.J. Super. at 172).] With those principles and the parallel facts of Menendez in mind, the panel reasoned that N.J.S.A. 40A:14-118 authorized the Trenton City Council to enact an ordinance creating a table of organization for the police department, but did not mandate the number of officers to fill each rank within the police department. Id. at 416-17. Because the City Council exercised discretion in establishing ranks and the number of officers to serve in each rank, the ordinance was deemed legislative in nature and subject to referendum. Id. at 416-18. Last, the panel rejected the Committee of Petitioners contention that Ordinance 04-75 was facially invalid because it excessively delegated administrative authority by setting a minimum and maximum range of officers to fill each rank, rather than fixing the exact number of officers for each rank. Id. at 419. We granted the City s petition for certification challenging the Appellate Division s order scheduling a referendum for Ordinance 04-75 and denied the Committee of Petitioners cross-petition contesting the facial validity of the ordinance. 189 N.J. 646 (2007). See footnote 3 A. [(Emphasis added).] The words, any ordinance passed by the council, standing alone, do not suggest that the Legislature intended a particular category of ordinance to be exempted from the referendum requirement. Ibid. (emphasis added). The Legislature could have qualified the referendum right by stating that only some ordinances or legislative ordinances are subject to voter approval. But it did not. Instead, it enacted a statute stating that the power of referendum applies to any ordinance. See footnote 9 We must ascribe to the statutory words their ordinary meaning and significance. DiProspero, supra, 183 N.J. at 492. Here, based on its statutory context, the word any clearly is synonymous with the word all. Webster s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 96 (2001) (noting that any is generally understood to be synonymous with all ); Black s Law Dictionary 86 (5th ed. 1979) (giving various definitions of any including, one out of many, an indefinite number, and some, but recognizing that any is often synonymous with either, every, or all and that [i]ts generality may be restricted by the context ). See, e.g., Downey v. Bd. of Educ. of Jersey City, 74 N.J. Super. 548, 552 (App. Div. 1962) (finding no ambiguity in the words any office, employment or position within N.J.S.A. 40:69A-208(a) of Faulkner Act, as [t]hey are words commonly used, easily understood and plainly all-inclusive ). By that definition, the term any ordinance does not lend itself to subdividing ordinances into various classes, such as administrative and legislative. Because we find no ambiguity in the statutory language, our role in construing the statute could come to an end. Our duty is only to apply the statute as enacted, not to rewrite it or presume that the Legislature intended something other than that expressed by way of the plain language. DiProspero, supra, 183 N.J. at 492 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). It is not our function to write in an additional qualification which the Legislature pointedly omitted from the statute, or engage in conjecture or surmise which will circumvent [its] plain meaning. Ibid. (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). Despite the apparent clarity of our plain-language interpretation of the statute, a body of case law has developed interpreting any ordinance to mean that only legislative, and not administrative, ordinances are subject to referendum under N.J.S.A. 40:69A-185. We now turn to those cases. [Ibid. (emphasis added).] The final bill that became law eliminated the exception for ordinances authorizing an improvement or the incurring of indebtedness and increased to fifteen percent the number of protesting voters necessary to trigger a referendum. See N.J.S.A. 40:69A-185. The Legislature obviously considered and rejected writing in the qualification to the right of referendum contained in the earlier bill. We can infer that the Legislature was mindful not only of the breadth of the statute, but also of how to expand or contract voter participation. Indeed, the text of N.J.S.A. 40:69A-185 contains at least a partial, if not total, exception to the referendum rule for municipal budgets. N.J.S.A. 40:69A-185 provides that no ordinance shall take effect before twenty days of the time of its final approval, except when otherwise required by general law or permitted by the provisions of [N.J.S.A. 40:69A-181.] The twenty-day grace period allows protesting citizens the time to file the requisite number of signatures necessary to suspend implementation of the ordinance until a referendum vote. N.J.S.A. 40:69A-185. The Legislature, however, exempted local budget ordinances from this twenty-day waiting period, See footnote 11 signifying that, unlike other ordinances, a budget ordinance cannot be suspended. Interestingly, on that basis, the Cuprowski court concluded that [i]t therefore must be assumed that the Legislature excluded the budget from recall because it becomes effective immediately upon adoption. 101 N.J. Super. at 21. The point of this discussion is that the Legislature knew precisely how to exclude particular ordinances from the purview of the referendum statute when it wished to do so. Buttressing this point is the fact that throughout the New Jersey Statutes Annotated the Legislature has exempted particular ordinances from a referendum challenge. For example, the Municipal Land Use Law (MLUL), N.J.S.A. 40:55D-1 to -129, provides that [n]o zoning ordinance and no amendment or revision to any zoning ordinance shall be submitted to or adopted by initiative or referendum. N.J.S.A. 40:55D-62(b); see also Tumpson v. Farina, 240 N.J. Super. 346, 351 (App. Div.) (recognizing N.J.S.A. 40:55D-62 as statutory exception to referendum statute), aff d, 120 N.J. 55 (1990). The MLUL was enacted after passage of the Faulkner Act, demonstrating that the Legislature knew how to carve out exceptions to the referendum statute. Ordinances exempted from referendum are found in many other statutes. See, e.g., N.J.S.A. 27:19-26.5 (exempting from referendum municipal ordinance authorizing sale, lease, or conveyance of real or personal property to commission); N.J.S.A. 40:14B-48 (exempting from referendum municipal ordinance authorizing sale, lease, or conveyance of real or personal property to municipal authority for purpose of maintaining or operating utility system, including water distribution or sewage facilities); N.J.S.A. 40:66A-52 (exempting from referendum municipal ordinance authorizing sale, lease, or conveyance of real or personal property to solid waste management authority); N.J.S.A. 40:68A-19 (exempting from referendum municipal ordinance authorizing sale, lease, or conveyance of real or personal property to port authority); N.J.S.A. 40:68A-56 (exempting from referendum municipal ordinance authorizing sale, lease, or conveyance of real or personal property to municipal port authority); N.J.S.A. 40A:2-18 (exempting from referendum certain bond ordinances); N.J.S.A. 40A:4-3.2 (exempting from referendum municipal ordinance adopting State fiscal year). That sampling clearly establishes that the Legislatu re has determined, on multiple occasions, those municipal matters that should not be called before the voters in a referendum. Because the Legislature has made exceptions to N.J.S.A. 40:69A-185 with such precision in a multitude of statutes, we cannot find that it intended an amorphous legislative/administrative distinction that cannot be gleaned from the statute s text, legislative history, or place in the larger statutory scheme. SUPREME COURT OF NEW JERSEY NO. A-94 SEPTEMBER TERM 2006 ON CERTIFICATION TO Appellate Division, Superior Court IN RE REFERENDUM PETITION TO REPEAL ORDINANCE 04-75. DECIDED September 26, 2007 Justice Long PRESIDING OPINION BY Justice Albin CONCURRING/DISSENTING OPINIONS BY DISSENTING OPINION BY [i]f within 20 days of the submission of a certified petition by the municipal clerk the council shall fail to pass an ordinance requested by an initiative petition in substantially the form requested or to repeal an ordinance as requested by a referendum petition, the municipal clerk shall submit the ordinance to the voters . . . . 2-56 Establishment of Department and Police Director; number and types of positions; Police Director stipend; Chief of Administrative Services. B. Number and types of positions (1) Within the Department of Police, in addition to the Police Director and the Chief of Administrative Services, there shall be the following ranks and number of positions per rank: (1) Captains 6 to 9, (2) Lieutenants 18 to 23, (3) Sergeants 47 to 52 and (4) Police Officers 270 to 290. The Department may also include such civilian employees as may, from time to time, be approved by the Director. The parties have not argued what impact the adoption of Ordinance 06-66 has on the case before us. We express no opinion on the subject. The governing body of any municipality, by ordinance, may create and establish, as an executive and enforcement function of municipal government, a police force . . . . Any such ordinance shall, in a manner consistent with the form of government adopted by the municipality and with general law, provide for a line of authority relating to the police function and for the adoption and promulgation by the appropriate authority of rules and regulations for the government of the force and for the discipline of its members. The ordinance may provide for the appointment of a chief of police and such members, officers and personnel as shall be deemed necessary, the determination of their terms of office, the fixing of their compensation and the prescription of their powers, functions and duties, all as the governing body shall deem necessary for the effective government of the force. [(Emphasis added).] If within twenty days after such final passage and approval of such ordinance a petition protesting against the passage of such ordinance shall be filed with the municipal clerk and if the petition shall be signed by a number of legal voters of the municipality equal in number to at least 15% of the total votes cast in the municipality at the last election at which members of the General Assembly were elected, the ordinance shall be suspended from taking effect until proceedings are had as herein provided.