Opinion ID: 748844
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The City Council Resolutions

Text: 20 The district court found that the City's actions did not deprive the Larsens of any constitutionally protected property right. First, the court rejected the Larsens' argument that the City Council's resolutions were in effect ordinances that established an entitlement to the City's prepayment of medical bills for the rest of Peter Larsen's life. The court also held that even if the enactments were ordinances, they established only a method of payment rather than a substantive right to the medical benefits themselves, and therefore created no constitutionally protected property right. 21 A city ordinance can create a protected property interest if it establishes substantive criteria that, if met, entitle an individual to the property. Bayview-Lofberg's, 905 F.2d at 145. Wisconsin law, however, distinguishes between ordinances, which are of a general, permanent nature, and resolutions, which are informal enactment[s] of a temporary nature. Cross v. Soderbeck, 94 Wis.2d 331, 288 N.W.2d 779, 784 (1980) (quoting Wisconsin Gas & Elec. Co. v. Fort Atkinson, 193 Wis. 232, 213 N.W. 873, 878 (1927)). The parties seem to be in agreement that a resolution could only give rise to a protected property interest, or at least a lasting one, if it were in reality an ordinance despite its denomination as a resolution. The State's statutes provide that ordinances must be published in a prescribed manner within fifteen days of their passage, Wis. Stats. § 62.11(4)(a), and that ordinances shall take the form, The common council of the city of ... do ordain as follows. Wis. Stats. § 62.11(3)(f). The Beloit City Code, in turn, provides that [e]very ordinance or resolution in the nature of an ordinance shall have three separate readings in Council meetings before it can be passed. Beloit, Wis.Code § 2.07. 22 The parties go to great lengths to prove that the resolutions establishing the procedure for prepaying Officer Larsen's medical bills either were or were not read three times prior to passage and published after passage. It appears from the record that at least as to the first resolution-that of November 4, 1985--the Larsens may have presented enough evidence to create a genuine issue as to reading and publication. In addition, the absence of the prescribed language for an ordinance (The common council of the City of ... do ordain as follows) does not necessarily defeat the Larsens' argument. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has held that this statutory style for ordinances is directory rather than mandatory. Cross, 288 N.W.2d at 783-784 (holding ordinance valid despite departure from statutory language). 23 But the parties' dispute over publication and reading is not determinative of the issue, for the Larsens' argument fails on two other grounds. First, the Council's resolutions simply are not the kind of general, permanent enactments that ordinances under Wisconsin law are supposed to be. The resolutions, particularly the second and third of the three, provid[e] for the disposition of a particular piece of the administrative business of [the City]. See id. Rather than setting forth any generally applicable policy with regard to benefits for injured police officers, they state how the City will deal with the administrative difficulties produced by Home Insurance's delays and refusals with respect to Officer Larsen's medical bills. If the City Council had unambiguously denominated the enactments as ordinances and passed them with all of the formalities associated with ordinances, then the informal, non-general subject matter most likely would not defeat their status as ordinances. But here the presumption is the other way: the Council denominated two of the enactments as resolutions and the other as a statement. Given this fact, the subject matter of the enactments carries great weight, and they must be considered as resolutions rather than ordinances. 24 Second, even if the resolutions were ordinances, the district court was correct to hold that they did not give rise to a protected property interest. The resolutions did not create any substantive entitlement to the payment of medical expenses. That entitlement existed already as a result of Wisconsin's Worker's Compensation Act. Because Officer Larsen was injured in the exercise of his duties, the Act required the City's worker's compensation insurance carrier to pay his reasonable and necessary medical expenses. See Lisney v. Labor & Indus. Review Comm'n, 171 Wis.2d 499, 493 N.W.2d 14, 22-23 (1992). The Council's resolutions merely established a method of payment whereby the City would prepay some bills in order to minimize the inconvenience to the Larsens. The resolutions did not establish substantive criteria for the entitlement to property and therefore did not give rise to a constitutionally protected property interest. See Bayview-Lofberg's, 905 F.2d at 142. 25 The Larsens' reliance on Cushing v. City of Chicago, 3 F.3d 1156 (7th Cir.1993), to defeat this conclusion is misplaced. In Cushing, this Court held that an injured firefighter who alleged that he was deprived of payment of his medical expenses without prior notice or an opportunity to contest the decision had stated a claim under § 1983. Id. at 1161. The case is clearly distinguishable, however, because it involved the firefighter's substantive entitlement to the payments themselves, rather than the right to a particular method of payment. 26