Opinion ID: 2604688
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Judicial Scrapping of the Muskogee Sinking-Fund Remedy

Text: The court holds that mandamus can never be used to create a sinking fund obligation without an appropriated annual expense. None of the cases the court cites for this spurious doctrine stands for the invoked proposition. [21] Today's pronouncement allows mandamus as a remedy only if (1) funds have been appropriated, (2) the Assessor had included the revaluation costs in her annual budget, (3) unspent budgeted funds of the obligor were available to pay the Districts' share, (4) the mandamus claim is pressed in the fiscal year for which revaluation costs are sought to be recouped and (5) fiscal confusion (i.e., a year-end payment order) will not result. The court's ill-crafted substitution for settled law ignores the offending officials' (recalcitrant obligor-agencies') statutory duty to budget and to pay their share of the revaluation costs. Today's approach errs by wrongly superimposing upon the statute's unequivocal command the obligee's (Assessor's) extra-statutory burden (a) to monitor the district's budgets, and (b) to seek and secure mandamus during the fiscal year for the obligation in order to compel an obligor to include, and the Excise Board to approve, an appropriation for the revaluation expense. B.