Court Opinion

ID: 9751748
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 16:57:14.433899+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:26:58.468795
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Jones:
In Blumenschein v. Pittsburgh Housing Authority, 379 Pa. 566, 573, 109 A. 2d 331, Mr. Chief Justice Steen succinctly stated the presently pertinent rule to be that “courts will not review the actions of governmental bodies or administrative tribunals involving acts of discretion, in the absence of bad faith, fraud, capricious action or abuse of power . . . .” The instant case presents several of the specified situations, any one of which was sufficient to give the court below jurisdiction of the instant subject-matter.
The record before us amply justifies the conclusion that the action of the defendant Reading Parking Authority in drastically shifting the priorly fixed location of a garage unit, particularly in view of the disqualifying motivation found by the court below, was so arbitrary as to amount to an act of bad faith on the part of *606the members of the Authority Board, and the acquisition of the Whitner Company property, in which a participating Board member was pecuniarily interested, amounted to an abuse of power.
Nor was the resolution legally sustainable because a majority of the five members of the Authority Board, exclusive of the disqualified member, had voted for it. Marshall v. Ellwood City Boro., 189 Pa. 348, 352-353, 41 A. 994, is plainly not in point. There, the sanction ran against the offending member of council who, as a stockholder and secretary of the Ellwood Water Company, had voted in council for the contract between the Borough and the Water Company. As Mr. Justice Gbeen pointed out, — “The literal reading of the 66th section of the act in question [Criminal Code of March 31, 1860, P. L. 400] deals with the individual and prescribes the penal consequences of his dereliction in very plain and emphatic terms. But those consequences are personal to the offender and do not in terms extend to, or embrace, the legal effect of the municipal transactions in which he participated. Nothing upon that ¡subject is contained in the act of 1860.” On the contrary, here paragraph (d) of Section 11 of the Parking Authority Law of 1947 denounces as null and void the action of the Authority in respect of which a disqualified member participated.
Consequently, the Board’s action looking to the acquisition of the private properties necessary for the erection of a garage unit at Site P constituted a flagrant abuse of discretion for which the injunction granted below was the appropriate corrective.
I would affirm the decree at the cost of the appellant Authority on -the opinion for the learned court 'below.
Mr. Justice Musmannq joins in this dissenting opinion.