Court Opinion

ID: 9864793
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 16:11:52.339951+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:31:55.819131
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Bouck,
specially concurring.
In the judgment just rendered herein by this court I concur. My concurrence is not to he understood as approving certain expressions in Mr. Justice Holland’s opinion which I think are not necessary to the decision of this case; hence the present concurring- opinion.
The Moffat Tunnel Act (S. L. ’22, c. 2, pp. 88-108 [0. L. ’21, §§9590-9511]) created the Moffat Tunnel Improvement District as. a separate municipal corporation, and established the Moffat Tunnel Commission as the managing and controlling agency of the district. The act also provided for the building- up of the Moffat Tunnel Fund, granting to the commission plenary power to issue and sell millions of dollars’ worth of district bonds and to levy upon the real estate within the district all necessary special assessments for the liquidation of such bonds and for the payment of any other legitimate expenses authorized by the act. Under the terms of the act no moneys are permitted to be paid out of the fund except upon vouchers issued by the commission and warrants drawn by its president. It is obvious that the commission is thus vested with grave responsibilities calling for the exercise of its sound discretion. Every daim against the district must in the first instance be presented to the commission, whose duty it is to consider it and allow it in whole or in part, or else disallow it, according- to its honest judgment upon the evidence submitted. To such action there attaches the usual presumption of regularity which is indulged in favor of a duly established fact-finding body.
It is my belief that the proper remedy herein would have been mandamus, with a view to compelling the commission to act upon the claim, since it had failed to act *324solely because it doubted its power to allow even a part of the claim involved here. However, not having' objected on the ground of mistaken remedy, the district may be deemed to have waived the objection. The question then arises on the sum to- be allowed in this particular case. Since the issue between district and county seems to have been an out-and-out issue whether the district has the right to allow anything at all out of the fund, and not as to the validity of any individual element of the particular claim, the lower court may well be considered entitled to allow all those elements as represented by the aggregate. This view would seem supported by the state of the record before us, which shows that in the present case no serious attempt was made to defeat any part of the claim whether because of the nature of any element thereof or the unreasonableness of any amount. The district introduced no evidence whatever to contradict the evidence introduced by Denver and its treasurer. I take it therefore that under the record the decision simply means that the commission possesses the legal authority to expend moneys from the fund for the purpose of paying such claims as it finds to be valid claims under the provisions of the act. The commission’s failure to contest the concrete facts more strenuously makes the present result, of course, none the less a binding adjudication of the specific claim. On the other hand, the question, for instance, of what, if any, clerical services can ordinarily constitute proper charges against the fund does not seem to have been fully or finalty argued. Such questions were evidently subordinated to the main issue as to the power of the commission to pay anything at all. The similarity of like questions in relation to irrigation districts, improvement districts, etc., was, it seems, not seriously considered. (See Board of Co. Com’rs. of Otero Co. v. Otero Irrigation District, 56 Colo. 515, 526, 527, 139 Pac. 546, 550.) The exact limits of the proposition that no Colorado officer can get compensation in the form of salary, fees, costs, or expenses, except *325by express statutory authority, seem not to have been discussed. (Leckenby v. Post Co., 65 Colo. 443, 445, 176 Pac. 490, 492.) The determination of what is a proper claim in a particular ease may well be reserved until an actual controversy is before this, court after pursuing the regular course of action before the commission. The duty of the commission to consider and pass upon claims has now been definitely established. I limit my concurrence to the allowance of the claim herein, as being the decision called for by the peculiar condition of the record itself. I believe that this court’s decision ought to be considered as similarly limited.