Court Opinion

ID: 9834465
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 23:37:10.690187+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:44:15.902060
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
By its motion ior a rehearing appellee contends that -we have apparently taken no cognizance of articles 1097 and 109&, relating to special reassessment of paving costs against abutting property. We carefully construed all the reassessment statutes in our original opinion as having no application where the abutting property was at the time of the original assessment and at the time the paving was completed and accepted and the assessment Certificate issued a homestead, because such homestead is exempt by both the paving statute and the constitution from the assessment. To hold as contended for by appellee that the broad language “if for any reason, no part of the cost of such improvement has been borne by the abutting property or paid by the owner or owners thereof,” as used in article 1097, is sufficient authority for the reassessment of the cost against a homestead sold after the paving had been completed and accepted, but within the very indefinite period of reassessment, would render nugatory both the statute and the Constitution which exempt such a homestead from the paving assessment. The effect of such construction of these reassessment statutes would be to subject every homestead sold within the reassessment period, which period the statutes do not fix, but which has been construed to be for a reasonable time as the facts may disclose, to such assessment lien notwithstanding the statutory and constitutional inhibitions against such assessment against a homestead. In other words, the owner of a homestead could not alienate it within the reassessment period without subjecting it to the reassessment lien, because if the statutes authorized the reassessment so as to fix the lien on the alienated homestead, the purchaser would be charged with notice of the provisions of the statutes as a matter of law, and would be compelled to deduct the paving cost from the purchase price of the homestead thereby indirectly charging it with a lien for the paving in violation of the Constitution which renders void any and all attempts to create, either directly or indirectly, a lien upon the homestead.
The motion is overruled.
Overruled.