Opinion ID: 2055469
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: interpretive statement

Text: Approval of this act will authorize sale of $100,000,000.00 in bonds to be used (1) to provide facilities for the mentally retarded and mentally ill which will improve the quality of care and allow the State to receive partial Federal reimbursement for such services; (2) for construction and improvement of correctional facilities to provide safe and humane conditions; (3) to offer library services to the blind and handicapped; and (4) to provide for a forensic laboratory for the State Medical Examiner. The statute was challenged shortly after its adoption in an action filed under the Declaratory Judgments Act ( N.J.S.A. 2A:16-50 et seq. ) and the trial court upheld its constitutional validity in judgment rendered on October 18, 1978. The plaintiff in that action was the New Jersey Association on Correction (hereafter Association), formerly known as the Morrow Association, and a foremost and distinguished proponent of correctional reform. It promptly appealed the issue to the Appellate Division, where the matter was pending when the electorate approved the bond issue at the election of November 7, 1978. Thereafter the Appellate Division, on December 1, 1978, reversed the trial court, holding the underlying statute, and the bond issue it proposed, to be in conflict with the Constitution of New Jersey. The State appealed, and for reasons to be delineated herein, we were and are of the opinion that the Appellate Division was in error and that the statute and its authorized bond issue were indeed in compliance with that Constitution. Because of the urgent public question involved, we so declared by our Order entered herein on April 2, 1979, subject to amplification by this opinion. The Association had originally argued a deficiency in the title of the Act based on conceptual or semantic differences between public buildings (as in the title) and institutions (as in the body) of the Act. It thought this appeared to offend N.J. Const. (1947), Art. IV, § VII, par. 4, that    every law shall embrace but one object, and that shall be expressed in the title. This title contention was overruled by the trial court, was not addressed by the Appellate Division and the Association does not present it to this Court for consideration. Rather the not dissimilar gravamen of the Association's case implicated the one object factor of Art. IV, § VII, par. 4 and another constitutional mandate of like import which reads: The Legislature shall not    create    a debt or debts    unless the same shall be authorized by a law for some single object or work distinctly specified therein.    No such law shall take effect until it shall have been submitted to the people at a general election and approved by a majority of the legally qualified voters of the State voting thereon.    [ N.J. Const. (1947), Art. VIII, § II, par. 3]. The body of the Act illuminated the specific uses of the buildings contemplated as follows: Bonds of the State of New Jersey in the sum of $100,000,000.00 are hereby authorized for the construction and acquisition of public building and institutions as defined herein. Of such total the proceeds from the sale of bonds shall be allocated, to the maximum extent practicable and feasible, according to the following estimates of cost: a. The construction of public buildings for the mentally retarded in conjunction with the Federal Program for Intermediate Care Facilities/Mentally Retarded  $51,000,000.00; and for improvements and additions to facilities for the mentally ill  $8,000,000.00 to be implemented by the Department of Human Services. b. The construction of institutions for the incarcerated, including the completion of the reconstruction of Trenton State Prison, to be implemented by the Department of Corrections  $30,000,000.00. c. Construction of public buildings for records and for library facilities for blind and handicapped persons, to be implemented by the Department of Education  $6,500,000.00. d. Construction of a forensic science facility for the activities of the State Medical Examiner to be implemented by the Department of Law and Public Safety  $4,500,000.00 [ L. 1978, c. 79, § 5]. And as stated by the Appellate Division, these purposes were linked in that [a]ll of these building projects were legislatively found to be critically and immediately needed to carry out public responsibilities to the people of this State ( L. 1978, c. 79, § 2). All were recommended by the Commission on Capital Budgeting and Planning; all were designed to serve the administrative and institutional needs of State Government. [164 N.J. Super. at 119-20]. The question presented, then, is whether these different projects constituted a single object in the intendment of the Constitution. The Association asserts that [t]he unconstitutionality of L. 1978, c. 79, can be found    in the inclusion in one enactment of several objects to be served by the issuance of the bonds authorized by this enactment[;] that these purposes are essentially unrelated to each other, or related only at a prohibited level of abstraction, and are each to be administered by different departments of the Executive Branch [; that] their inclusion within one enactment requiring voter approval for its effectiveness violates the express constitutional mandate designed, in part, to enable independent voter appraisal of each purpose for which bonds were to be issued. [164 N.J. Super. at 120-21]. The argument of the State was perceived by the Appellate Division as follows: The State's response to this argument is, as stated in its brief, that [w]hile the bond proceeds may be allocated to several construction projects, serving different societal needs, and administered by different departments of State Government, all share the common characteristic of being public facilities, operated for the public good. Although each proposed facility would serve different functions, each would, nonetheless, be operated as public buildings used for providing services for the public's good. The different projects are all related to, and in furtherance of, that general purpose, thereby satisfying the test of compliance with the state constitutional standard. [164 N.J. Super. at 121]. As applicable to both constitutional object provisions, we agree with the Appellate Division's synthesis of the issue: Both parties properly identify the standard by which compliance with the single object rule will be measured, the relatedness vel non of the various matters embraced within one enactment. As observed in Newark v. Mount Pleasant Cemetery Co., 58 N.J.L. 168, [171] (E. & A. 1895): The evil intended to be guarded against [by the single object rule] was not the inclusion in one act of more than a single matter, but the inclusion therein of matters not properly related among themselves. So by its obvious construction this constitutional provision justifies and permits legislation by one statute, looking toward a single general object, although it contains and enacts various and multiform matters, if those matters are properly related to each other and tend to effectuate the general object. [164 N.J. Super. at 121]. In further refinement of the issue, we discard at once the notion that any relevance attaches to the fact that the construction projects enumerated in section 5 of the Act, supra, were to be implemented by different departments of the Executive Branch of government. If one were dealing, for instance, with educational instruction of prisoners, it would plainly be appropriate and certainly not disparate in concept for responsibilities therefor to be shared between the Department of Corrections (primarily responsible for custody) and the Department of Education (essentially involved with instruction). Cf. N.J.S.A. 30:4AA-1. The New Jersey Constitution provides for the organization of the Executive Branch of State government into not more than 20 principal departments, all intended to have the operational flexibility needed to assist the Governor in his primary obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. N.J. Const. (1947), Art. V, § I, par. 11; Art. V, § IV, par. 1. This flexibility extends to the statutory creation of new departments, conferring upon them functions previously exercised by others ( e.g., Department of the Public Advocate, N.J.S.A. 52:27E-1 et seq.; Department of Community Affairs, N.J.S.A. 52:27D-1 et seq. ). It accommodates as well the separation of departments ( e.g., the former Department of Institutions and Agencies, L. 1918, c. 147, and its transposition into the Department of Corrections, N.J.S.A. 30:1B-1 et seq., and the Department of Human Services, N.J.S.A. 30:1A-1 et seq.; the former Department of Education, L. 1945, c. 51, into the new Departments of Education, N.J.S.A. 18A:3-1 et seq., and of Higher Education, N.J.S.A. 18A:4-1 et seq.; the former Department of Banking and Insurance, L. 1891, c. 6, and its separation into a Department of Insurance, N.J.S.A. 17:1C-1 et seq., and a Department of Banking, N.J.S.A. 17:1B-1 et seq. ). This flexibility is for the convenient and efficient operation of State government and was clearly intended by the people in their adoption of the 1947 Constitution. Even the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers of the branches of government, as pointed out by Chief Justice Vanderbilt in Massett Building Co. v. Bennett, 4 N.J. 53, 57 (1950), has nowhere been construed as creating three mutually exclusive watertight compartments. To do so would render government unworkable   . A fortiori the singularity or relatedness of purposes here involved are unaffected by their fulfillment by different Executive departments. The surviving relatedness requirement has at least a two-fold significance. The first involves information adequate to so advise the voter as to enable an understanding appraisement of the project. Behnke v. New Jersey Highway Auth., 13 N.J. 14, 32 (1953). In Behnke, supra, this Court, in construing the reach and purpose of the constitutional provision, said: The design of this constitutional limitation is the confinement of the debt or liability to a single object or work. The money thus provided cannot be expended for one purpose under the guise of another. This for the protection of the State's revenue and credit as well as for an understanding appraisement of the project by the electorate. [ Id. at 32 (emphasis supplied)]. Considering the question and Interpretive Statement on the ballot as to this bond issue, supra, one would wonder how any literate voter could be misled or fail to have an understanding appraisement of the project here involved. The information could hardly have been more specific. We are not dealing here with an announced simple purpose of the erection of buildings or needed public buildings as the Appellate Division seems to have understood the State's contention. This view led that court to comment [w]e cannot regard the construction of a building, or buildings, without advice concerning the use to which the building will be put, as an appropriate legislative object, and that [l]egislation does not ordinarily provide for the erection of a building without some description of the purpose to which it is to be put. 164 N.J. Super. at 124-25. That, of course, has no relationship to the present case, where the intended uses of the buildings were fully described to the voters and could not possibly have been misunderstood as accommodating a public zoo, hockey or gambling activity or other discordant examples mentioned. Id. at 125. This even though these latter items might broadly come within the State's somewhat understated formula of commonality in its brief  public buildings used for providing services for the public's good. Id. at 121. Still less could one consider as apposite the Appellate Division's reliance on Schnoerr v. Miller, 4 Ohio App. 2d 99, 212 N.E. 2d 671 (App. Ct. 1963), aff'd, 2 Ohio St. 2d 121, 206 N.E. 2d 902 (1965), where only a public building was specified in the crucial bond question, whereas the specific purpose, as generally known in the small community, was the construction of a public bomb shelter. Such vague description was held defective in failing to identify the one purpose of a municipal bond issue as required under Ohio law. This Appellate Division accurately perceived the second purpose of the constitutional restriction as designed to prevent    the pernicious legislative practice commonly known as logrolling whereby a weak or unpopular measure is coupled with an unrelated popular one in order to facilitate its passage. If permitted, the practice confronts the voter, be he legislator or citizen, with a difficult and unfair choice; he must either forfeit the benefits of the desired legislation in order to vote his conscience on the measure he rejects, or he must accept the provision to which he has objection in order to obtain the benefits of the measure he favors. Independent appraisal of each measure, on its own merits, is frustrated and no one can be certain as to whether each of such improvidently combined provisions would have obtained voter approval had it been presented to the voter on an independent basis. When, however, the single object rule is complied with, the voter is enabled to voice his reaction to the merits of the provision submitted. [164 N.J. Super. at 122]. This represents the primary target of the Association's attack, namely the inclusion of construction of institutions for the incarcerated, including the completion of the reconstruction of Trenton State Prison   , L. 1978, c. 79, § 5, with other purposes of institutional construction. It identifies this as the central issue in the case. Disillusioned with the bruited failure of rehabilitation in the prisons and consequent high rates of recidivism, it seeks a pause in prison construction, so that they will house only the most violent and dangerous of prisoners, looking to other means of community treatment and rehabilitation which, whether in esse or not, need not be discussed in detail here. This is a valid question, of wide national currency and dispute. [1] The Association argues that in the face of such objection the prison construction should not be included with the other purposes and, if it were, the Association (however empathetic it might be to those other purposes) would be constrained to oppose the whole bond issue. It projected this argument in many forums, including the Commission on Capital Budgeting and Planning, the Legislature, the people in the general election, the trial court, the Appellate Division, and finally before this Court. It was successful only in the Appellate Division. On the other hand, the Legislature was aware of the desperate need for prison improvement in New Jersey. The physical deficiencies of the aged State Prison at Trenton have been notorious and condemned for a half century, as noticed by this Court in Avant v. Clifford, 67 N.J. 496, 559 (1975). It is the intensity of clash between these philosophic viewpoints that impels the Association to argue that combining this construction with other projects constituted the improvidently combined provisions referred to by the Appellate Division in condemning the Act. 164 N.J. Super. at 122. Yet it may be easily imagined that mental health advocates might as strongly urge the elimination of many traditional mental institutions in favor of theoretical community facilities and thus oppose and seek separate consideration of that segment of the bond issue proposed by the Act  even if State facilities for the care of these unfortunates fell into or continued in a condition of dilapidation in the meanwhile. Other groups might feel as strongly that the State is already expending enough on facilities for the blind and handicapped, and so on. But these questions, however one may view their merits, are for the Legislature and the people to decide, subject only to constitutional bounds. For, as frequently noted by this Court, the prudence, wisdom, good sense or otherwise of the legislative action are not for the Court, if it is only within the Constitution. White v. North Bergen, 77 N.J. 538, 554-55 (1978); Vornado, Inc. v. Hyland, 77 N.J. 347, 354-55 (1978); Hutton Park Gardens v. West Orange, 68 N.J. 543, 564-65 (1975); Brown v. Heymann, 62 N.J. 1, 10-11 (1972); Burton v. Sills, 53 N.J. 86, 95 (1968); Thomas v. Kingsley, 43 N.J. 524, 530 (1965); The Grand Union Co. v. Sills, 43 N.J. 390, 403 (1964); Two Guys from Harrison, Inc. v. Furman, 32 N.J. 199, 229 (1960).