Opinion ID: 3010709
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Plaintiffs have such other legal and equitable

Text: relief as the Court may deem appropriate, including costs and expenses.3 Complaint at pp. 19-20 (emphases in original). In the district court, the defendants moved to dismiss all or part of the suit -- or, in the alternative, to stay the suit pending state court resolution of state law questions -- on a variety of grounds. Defendants chiefly argued that: 1) the Tax Injunction Act (The district courts shall not enjoin, suspend or restrain the assessment, levy or collection of any tax under State law where a plain, speedy and efficient remedy may be had in the courts of such State) was a bar to the district court's subject matter jurisdiction; 2) _________________________________________________________________ 3. In their brief on appeal, the Property Owners have characterized the relief they seek as (a) A declaration that the`West Rehoboth Expansion of the Dewey Beach Sanitary Sewer District' is void ab initio; (b) Injunctive relief barring mandatory connections; barring new construction on Phase III of the sewer project; and barring related charges; (c) Attorney's fees and costs under 42 U.S.C. SS 1983 and 1988; and (d) Compensatory damages resulting from the unlawful creation of the sewer district and its sewer system. Appellants' Brief on Appeal, pp. 3-4. 6 principles of comity required dismissal of the suit; and 3) the Clean Water Act claim was not cognizable against the DNREC defendants. The district court concluded that the suit should be dismissed. Kerns v. Dukes, 944 F. Supp. 1214 (D. Del. 1996). Central to the district court's analysis was the determination that the suit was a challenge to the imposition and enforcement of taxes: as noted above, the suit seeks inter alia to enjoin the defendants from charging or assessing said members of the class for the costs of creating, constructing, maintaining and operating said sewer district (and any debt thereon). As a challenge to a local taxation scheme, the suit was found by the district court to run afoul both of federal comity principles and of the Tax Injunction Act, 28 U.S.C. S 1341. The district court went on to state: This holding does not put an end to plaintiffs' chances of prevailing on their lawsuit in the state court system. All arguments made by plaintiffs before this Court may be made in a state court. Id. at 1222. In an order dated November 8, 1996, the district court dismissed the action for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and the Property Owners appealed to this court. On appeal, the Property Owners contended that: The primary, objective purpose of the present lawsuit is to address the arbitrary and capricious establishment of a sewer district. Thus, the relief requested in the case at bar does not implicate Federal Comity or the Tax Injunction Act. Appellants' Brief p. 34. After oral argument, and because the resolution of this appeal potentially implicated a question of Delaware law, this court issued an order certifying a question to the Supreme Court of Delaware.4 _________________________________________________________________ 4. Delaware Supreme Court Rule 41(a)(ii) provides: The Supreme Court of the United States, a Court of Appeals of the United States, the United States District Court or the Highest Appellate Court of any other State may, on motion or sua sponte, certify to this Court for decision a question or questions of law arising in any case before it prior to the entry offinal judgment if there is an important and urgent reason for an immediate determination of such question or questions by this Court and the certifying court has not decided the question or questions in the case. 7 Our certification order read, in relevant part; 5 There are two crucial issues on appeal. As to the first, without now deciding the issue we will assume for the purposes of this certification order that the district court is correct that plaintiffs' suit is the sort of challenge to the processes of state and local taxation which federal comity doctrines and the Tax Injunction Act were designed to keep out of a federal district court. The remaining issue is whether the courts of Delaware can provide plaintiffs with (in the language of the Tax Injunction Act, language which we also regard as applicable to the comity aspect of the case) aplain, speedy and efficient remedy. This is of course a federal question to be determined by this Court. However, the federal question is one whose basic ingredients constitute a question of Delaware law. Therefore, as ordered below, we will certify to the Supreme Court of Delaware the following question: To what extent does the jurisdiction of Delaware's courts (whether taken singly or in combination) encompass plaintiffs' claims, and to what extent are Delaware's courts able to provide such relief as those claims, if sustained, would entail? We seek, that is, to ascertain the degree to which plaintiffs are able to pursue in the courts of Delaware those claims that they have chiefly pressed in the federal district court: First, that they were arbitrarily denied the right to vote on a new district. Second, they were arbitrarily denied an environmental process which we believe to be fixed and vested. And third, that the sewer district that was built is not legitimately or rationally related to an existing health menace for the need for that sewer. And that's the basis of the lawsuit. Argument of Counsel for Plaintiffs at Hearing Before District Court on Motions to Dismiss, Oct. 16, 1996, Transcript at 16-17. We seek also to ascertain to what degree the requested relief -- including a _________________________________________________________________ 5. The full text of this court's certification order is annexed hereto as