Opinion ID: 2812467
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The “Sustenance” Requirement

Text: Addressing the first requirement, the Court says “supported” can mean (and here must mean) “sustenance, maintenance, or both.” Ante at __. The Court provides this as the “maintenance” definition of “supported”: “to pay the costs of: maintain; to supply with the 21 means of maintenance (as lodging, food or clothing) or to earn or furnish funds for maintaining[.]” Ante at __ (quoting WEBSTER’S THIRD NEW INT’L DICTIONARY 2297 (2002)). The Court then concludes that “supported” cannot mean “maintenance” in this context because otherwise the definition would include “any private entity that received any public funds,” and “even a paper vendor with hundreds of clients would qualify as a ‘governmental body’ merely by virtue of selling office supplies to a single state office.” Ante at __. In contrast to the “maintenance” definition, the Court gives this “sustenance” definition of “supported”: “to provide a basis for the existence or subsistence of: serve as the source of material or immaterial supply, nourishment, provender, fuel, raw material, or sustenance of.” Ante at __ (quoting WEBSTER’S THIRD NEW INT’L DICTIONARY at 2297). The Court thus distinguishes between the “maintenance” meaning of “supported” and the “sustenance” meaning of “supported” and concludes that in the context of the Act, “supported by” can only mean the latter, so the Act applies only to private entities “sustained, at least in part, by public funds, meaning they would not perform the same or similar services without public funds.” Ante at __. Although the Court reads far more into these two definitions of “support” than I find there, as explained below, I generally agree that the term “support” must refer here to monies paid as general funds to sustain the recipient, rather than funds paid as consideration for specific goods or services. But the Court goes far beyond that principle today, and holds that an entity is “supported in whole or in part by public funds” only if the entity cannot survive without those funds. As a result, the Court writes the words “in part” completely out of the statutory definition. To be sure, the Court creates the appearance that it is actually enforcing the statute as written by referring to the “supported . . . in part” language several times in its opinion: 22 • “requires us to decide whether the term ‘supported’ encompasses private entities . . . sustained—in whole or in part—by [public] funds,” ante at ___ (emphasis added); • “‘supported’ . . . unambiguously includes only those entities at least partially sustained by public funding,” ante at __ (emphasis added); • “[the Partnership] is not wholly or partially sustained by public funds,” ante at ___ (emphasis added); • “the [Act] applies only to entities acting as the functional equivalent of a governmental body that are ‘sustained’ at least in part, by public funds,” ante at __ (emphasis added); and • “we define ‘supported in whole or in part by public funds’ to include only those private entities or their sub-parts sustained, at least in part, by public funds,” ante at ___ (emphases added). But despite these lip-service payments to the statute’s language, the Court repeatedly holds that an entity (or any part, section, or portion of an entity) that receives public funds as sustenance (as opposed to maintenance) is not a governmental body unless it cannot survive and pursue its mission without those funds: • “defining ‘supported’ as ‘sustenance’ ensures that only an entity, or its ‘part, section or portion,’ whose existence is predicated on the continued receipt of government funds would qualify as a ‘governmental body,’” ante at __; • “[t]o be ‘sustained’ by public funds suggests the existence of a financially dependent relationship between the governmental body and a private entity or its subdivision,” ante at __; • “a private entity would qualify under a financially dependent construction of ‘supported’ if it could not pursue its mission and objectives without the receipt of public funds, even if that funding only partially financed the entity’s endeavors. In short, an entity ‘supported’ by public funds would not just receive government funds; it would require them to operate in whole or in part,” ante at __; • “[the Partnership] is not ‘supported’ by public funds because it receives only a small portion of its revenue from government contracts[, a]nd even if these government contracts were eliminated, it could continue to operate given the substantial revenue derived from other non-governmental sources,” ante at ___; 23 • “the statute encompasses only those private entities dependent on the public fisc to operate as a going concern,” ante at ___; and • “An entity . . . that does not depend on any particular revenue source to survive—public or private—is not sustained even in part by government funds,” ante at __. The Court thus holds that a private entity that receives public funds can be a governmental body under the Act only if it cannot “survive” or “exist” or “pursue its mission and objectives” without those public funds, even if those funds are just “one of several contributing sources.” I disagree. An entity that is “sustained” (as the Court uses that word) by funds it receives from several different sources is sustained “in part” by the funds from each of those sources, even if it could survive and pursue its mission without the funds from any one source. The Court asserts that “sustenance implies that if the government ceased to provide financial support, the entity would be unable to meet its financial obligations.” Ante at ___. But even if that were true,8 “sustenance in part” implies the exact opposite. If “part” of an entity’s “sustenance” comes from one source, it is “sustained in part” by that source even if it could survive without that part. The Court attempts to justify its “surviv[al]” requirement by suggesting that the statute’s “‘in part’ language may envision a multi-division entity that does business with the government, but not uniformly and not across all units.” Ante at ___. “For instance,” the Court explains, if a “large corporation” has a “subdivision” that “is wholly funded by government contracts,” but the 8 The Court fails to identify any dictionary that defines “supported” to mean financially dependent upon for its very existence. See ante at __. While there are many definitions of “support” that refer to “sustenance or maintenance” or even “a basis for the existence or subsistence of,” see ante at __ (emphasis added), none of the definitions require an absolute dependence, and in any event, the statute’s definition expressly excludes such a requirement by referring to support “in part.” 24 government funds are only “a relatively small portion of the corporation’s total revenue,” the corporation “may be said to be supported ‘in part’ by public funds.” Ante at ___. This illustration confuses the statute’s reference to “supported in part” with its reference to the “part, section, or portion” of an entity. The statute provides that the “part, section, or portion” of an entity is a governmental body if it is “supported in whole or in part by public funds.” TEX. GOV’T CODE § 552.003(1)(A)(xii). The Court is correct that, if one subdivision of a large corporation is “supported in whole . . . by public funds,” then the corporation itself is “supported . . . in part by public funds.” But the statute permits the corporation to limit the Act’s application to the subdivision by showing that only that subdivision (i.e., that “part, section, or portion” of the corporation) is “supported in whole or in part” by public funds. The illustration the Court “conceptualize[s]” has nothing to do with the Court’s “surviv[al]” requirement. A relevant illustration is this: even if only 5% of the funds that support the Court’s hypothetical corporate subdivision were public funds, the subdivision would still be “supported in part” by those funds, and would thus be a governmental body under the Act’s plain language. An entity “supported . . . in part by public funds” is a governmental body, regardless of whether it could “survive” or “pursue its mission” without those funds. See id. The Court’s construction reads this language out of the Act by requiring the whole of the entity to live or die by the public fisc.