Opinion ID: 3008277
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Fraud in the Necessity of the District Plant

Text: The Whittingtons assert that the City’s determination of necessity for District Plant 2 was fraudulent because the City misrepresented to the Whittingtons that it was necessary to serve the convention center expansion and the hotel project. The City’s final offer letter to the Whittingtons stated the “plant will be used to provide chilled water necessary to operate the air conditioning systems of the Convention Center expansion and” the hotel project. As evidence of fraud, the 18 See T EX . L OC . G O V ’T C O D E § 251.001(a)(1) (authorizing home rule municipalities to “exercise the right of eminent domain for a public purpose” such as providing, enlarging, or improving electric power systems). 25 Whittingtons point to an email from the project manager for District Plant 2 to the author of the final offer letter stating: “to be completely clear, someone’s pointed out that actually those buildings are currently going to be served from [District Plant 1] until the new plant is built . . . . So this new plant is not absolutely necessary for operation of the buildings mentioned but a redundancy is much better.” (emphasis added). District Plant 1 still provided service to the convention center expansion and the hotel project for some time even after District Plant 2 became operational due to a decrease in customer demand as a result of economic market conditions. The project manager’s statement is not evidence of fraud for multiple reasons. First, the statement that the district plant was not absolutely necessary was in a class of communications not ordinarily relevant to the inquiry of whether the City Council’s determination of necessity was fraudulent, in bad faith, or arbitrary and capricious. To assess the City’s determinations, we look to official materials such as orders, resolutions, and minutes. See Horton, 468 S.W.2d at 878. Our purpose in restricting our review to these materials is that the words of one city council member or city employee do not ordinarily bind the entire city council. See, e.g., AT&T Commc’ns of Tex., LP v. Sw. Bell Tel. Co., 186 S.W.3d 517, 528-29 (Tex. 2006) (“But the statement of a single legislator, even the author and sponsor of the legislation, does not determine legislative intent”). Therefore, emails by City employees are not among the items we ordinarily consider in undertaking this review. Here, the Whittingtons argue that the City Council ratified the acts of its employees, adopting the email as its own. Specifically, the City’s 2006 resolution stated that the public necessity to acquire Block 38 in its entirety . . . is hereby confirmed and ratified . . . and all acts done or initiated by employees, attorneys or representatives of the City to acquire or condemn Block 38 in its entirety . . . are hereby authorized, 26 ratified, approved, confirmed and validated and declared to be valid in all respects and purposes as of the respective dates thereof for the public necessity and for the public use as a City parking garage, a chilling plant, and other municipal facilities. Assuming without deciding that the ratification elevated the email to have the force of a City Council resolution, we disagree that it demonstrates that the City’s determination of necessity was fraudulent. As an initial matter, this argument equates “necessary” with “absolutely necessary.” The Local Government Code only requires that the condemnor consider the taking necessary for the public use. TEX . LOC. GOV ’T CODE § 251.001(a). The email the Whittingtons rely on states that the district plant was not “absolutely necessary” for the operation of the convention center expansion and the hotel project. See United States v. Comstock, 130 S.Ct. 1949, 1956 (2010) (differentiating “necessary” and “absolutely necessary” under the federal constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause). Moreover, even had the email stated that the district plant was not necessary, the City Council expressed a clear belief in its 2006 resolution that the district plant was necessary. This determination of necessity was one of the two purposes the resolution accomplished (the other being the inclusion of a twenty-foot strip in the taking, addressed infra at Part VI). We interpret statutes and ordinances to avoid absurd results. Carreras v. Marroquin, 339 S.W.3d 68, 73 (Tex. 2011). The Whittingtons invite us to interpret the resolution in a way that negates one of its two purposes. We decline to do so. The evidence instead indicates that District Plant 2 was necessary to perform district cooling in the future. Consumer demand for the program increased over time, and the City needed additional capacity to meet not only the demand but also its contractual obligations. In addition, District Plant 2 was needed as a backup in the event that District Plant 1 required down time. This evidence 27 confirms that the City determined District Plant 2 to be necessary—even if we were to assume the City did not believe it was absolutely necessary.