Opinion ID: 1896542
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Statutory Misconstruction Argument

Text: The County's second argument, which comes in two parts, is that even if the statutory term school purpose has no plain meaning, the Superior Court accorded that term the wrong meaning, by committing two distinct errors of statutory construction. First, the County claims, the Superior Court misread the case law interpreting § 8105, which (the County says) construes the phrase educational or school purposes as articulating only one single standard. To say it differently, the County claims that the Superior Court's conclusion that the terms educational purpose and school purpose had separate, distinct meanings, is erroneous. This claim merely restates, in the form of a primary argument, a proposition that the County previously advanced  and that this Court rejected  as a subsidiary argument in the plain meaning context. This argument was rejected, because it would reduce the term school purpose to meaningless surplusage, and also would do violence to the presumption that the legislature intended to give meaning to each term used in the statute. The County insists, nonetheless, that the phrase educational or school purposes must be found to articulate a single standard, because that phrase was so construed in Burris v. Tower Hill School Association. In that case, the County sought to tax a residence that was owned by Tower Hill School and used as a home for the school's headmaster. Tower Hill, which was (and is) entirely a day school, admitted that the residence, which was located one block from Tower Hill's campus, was used for no other purpose. Given those facts, the Burris court declined to exempt the property from taxation, finding that although the property benefited the headmaster (as his personal residence), it did not further any interest of the school. [21] The County insists that because the Burris court did not explicitly distinguish between the words educational and school, it implicitly determined that the phrase educational or school purpose represents a single standard. But the County's conclusion does not follow from its premise. In Burris, the court's analysis and result did not turn on the distinction between educational and school purpose. Nor was it necessary for the Burris court to consider any such distinction, because the school was advancing the blanket argument that the headmaster's residence was being used for an educational or school purpose, without making any effort either to parse or differentiate the two terms, or to advocate a separate definition of school purpose. Indeed, Burris is more supportive of the University's position than of the County's. In distinguishing cases relied upon by Tower Hill School on the ground that they involved colleges or boarding schools, the court stated: [The cited cases] have to do with colleges or boarding schools, and the rationale of the decisions is the reasonable necessity for the acquisition and maintenance of presidential and professorial residences in close proximity to the student body for inspirational, supervisional or disciplinary purposes, or as a convenient place for holding meetings and social affairs in connection with the institution....       The considerations impelling the courts in the cases cited are entirely absent from the case before the court. Here the school is a day school. The sole use of the property is as a residence for the headmaster. All of the duties of the headmaster may be performed at the school, and it is not intimated that these duties are not, in fact, performed at the school.... ....[T]here is nothing to indicate that the residence is used as an office for the head-master, or as a necessary and convenient place[to] interview[] prospective students or for conducting correspondence relating to the school. [22] The clear implication of this reasoning is that if Tower Hill were a college or a boarding school, the headmaster's residence would not be taxable, even if the residence was not being used for any other purpose. That is significant, because the University of Delaware is a college that furnishes room and board to its students, most of whom live on campus. Because Tower Hill, unlike the University, was only a day school, the Burris court held that for the headmaster's residence to be tax exempt, some school-related activities had to be conducted there, but none were. Burris does not aid the County's position here. The County's second, alternative argument is that even if the term school purposes denotes a distinct, separate standard, the court misapplied it by ignoring the rule of construction that requires a narrow interpretation of statutes that create exemptions from taxation, with any doubts being resolved in favor of the public and against the claimed exemption. This argument also misses the mark, because it misapprehends the applicable rule of construction. Although statutes creating tax exemptions are to be construed narrowly in the ordinary case, Burris itself recognizes that [s]tatutes exempting from taxation property devoted to educational purposes are in general construed more liberally than other tax exempting statutes.  [23] In short, the Superior Court, did not misread the case law or apply erroneous principles of statutory construction in arriving at the result that it reached.