Court Opinion

ID: 9739419
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:14:37.432976+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:12.121663
License: Public Domain

VANDE WALLE, Chief Justice,
concurring in result.
I agree with the majority opinion. I write only to question the application in North Dakota of the quote from 78 Am.Jur.2d Waterworks and Water Companies § 60 (1975) that distribution of water to a city’s inhabitants is a function undertaken by a city in its private or proprietary capacity. That statement, relied upon by Justice Meschke in his concurring opinion, may be true elsewhere but I doubt its validity in rural areas like North Dakota. One need only look at the many sections in the North Dakota Century Code regulating a city’s authority to operate water distribution systems as evidence that it is a public function. See, e.g., Chapter 40-22 and 40-33 of the NDCC.
The city is given the authority to operate a water distribution system in Chapter 40-33, NDCC, along with electric light and power *669plants, telephone plant, natural gas plant and heating plant. Interestingly, however, the authority in Chapter 40-22 to levy special assessments for those purposes includes only water and sewer systems. Indeed, the history in North Dakota belies the Am.Jur. observation. Whereas in earlier years some cities owned and operated light plants and distribution systems, and a few may still do so, I believe most cities in North Dakota now receive electricity through investor-owned or member-owned entities. The reverse is true for water and sewer systems. Private enterprise has not attempted to provide the service for the obvious reason that water and sewer lines cannot be expanded like lines for electric and telephone utilities.
Although there are now some rural water distribution systems being formed that may deliver water to smaller cities, nearly all, if not all, water and sewer systems are operated by cities. If we were to adhere to the “ordinary liability” theory of the special concurrence for the water systems in small-town rural North Dakota, I suggest we would endanger their existence and foster their demise. The statement in the special concurrence that “[l]ike the physical operation of an electric system, the physical operation of a water system is not a discretionary function that shelters a governmental body from tort liability” is a fiction in North Dakota. Historically and practically there has been a great difference between electric plants and water plants. Additionally, the supporting citation for that statement, Aslakson v. United States, 790 F.2d 688, 693 (8th Cir.1986) involved the Western Area Power Association, WAP A, a large electric distribution system which is an agency of the United States!
If it is argued that unless cities can pay ordinary negligence claims they should not have the water or sewer system, that argument is ruthless as applied to rural North Dakota, particularly when its purpose is to support a legal fiction, i.e., private or proprietary operation of water systems, that does not and probably never existed in this State. I resist the incorporation of this philosophy to the operation of water or sewer systems in small-town North Dakota, which already struggles for survival.