Court Opinion

ID: 9469687
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:46:34.741492+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:30.724218
License: Public Domain

PELL, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in the majority opinion with the exception of the disposition as to Ex parte Nos. 357 and 368 as to which I respectfully dissent.
The petition to the ICC to amend tariffs 357 and 368 were expressly for the “purpose of making increases in rates and charges fully applicable on Indiana Intrastate Traffic when in connection with Bituminous Coal rates and charges.” The railroad’s application specifically stated that the increases were being proposed because “the Indiana State Commission has held-down the increasés authorized by the ICC from 9% to 5% under X357A and from 15.7% to 13.7% under X368A on bituminous coal traffic.” Indeed, the majority opinion expressly rec*1106ognizes that the tariff published in the supplements “dealt only with rates for intrastate shipments of bituminous coal in Indiana.”
The ICC in the decision under review determines the rate increases published in the supplements to be general rate increases within the meaning of Section 214 of the Staggers Act. In doing so, the Commission ignores the generally accepted definition of the statutory phrase “general' rate increases.” I can see no basis for the language contained in the railroad’s application qualifying as a request to promulgate “general rate increases.” General rate increases are those which apply nationally or throughout broad regions of the country, affecting all commodities or large numbers of them. The distinction between general rate increase cases, or general revenue proceedings, and agency actions affecting individual rate adjustments is one that is well established, understood by the industry and heretofore urged upon the courts by the Commission, in terms altogether at odds with the position it now takes.
In Florida Citrus Commission v. United States, 144 F.Supp. 517 (N.D.Fla.1956), aff’d mem., 352 U.S. 1021, 77 S.Ct. 589, 1 L.Ed.2d 595 (1957), the Commission argued for dismissal of the petition for review, maintaining that its decision was entered in a general revenue proceeding and did not connote its approval of a particular rate filing. The court agreed:
[T]he Commission has exercised jurisdiction in a number of proceedings which have been commonly called “general revenue” cases, where revision has been sought as to ... all traffic or on particular commodities or groups of commodities, either nationwide or in a large territory, in contradistinction to the ‘rate’ cases, so called, in which the reasonableness of specific rates has been determined.
144 F.Supp. at 521.
Similarly, the Commission successfully persuaded the court to dismiss the petition for review of its decision authorizing a general rate increase in Atlantic City Electric Co. v. United States, 306 F.Supp. 338, 341 (S.D.N.Y.1969), where the court noted:
[T]he proceeding before the Commission was a general revenue proceeding. The Commission was concerned primarily with the “need, in the public interest, of adequate and efficient railway transportation service” and with the railroads’ “need of revenues sufficient to enable the carriers, under honest, economical, and efficient management to provide such service.” 49 U.S.C. § 15a(2). The increases in rates were general, even though the percentage of increase varied from commodity to commodity.
See also Aberdeen & Rockfish Railroad Co. v. S.C.R.A.P., 422 U.S. 289, 313, 95 S.Ct. 2336, 2352, 45 L.Ed.2d 191 (1975), in which the Supreme Court said:
Proceedings ... in which the ICC has been called upon to decide whether to prevent a substantially across-the-board rate increase, have become known as general revenue proceedings. The ICC’s inquiry has tended to focus on whether the railroads are really in need of increased revenues and has tended to leave for individual rate or refund proceedings under 49 U.S.C. §§ 13 and 15 the problem of determining just which commodities on which runs should bear the increased burden, and to what extent.
The cited cases demonstrate that the tariff filings increasing the railroad rates on bituminous coal traffic moving intrastate in Indiana simply cannot be labeled “general rate increases” as the Commission sought to do in its decision. By their own terms, the tariff supplements relate “only to a single commodity” and do not provide for, in the language of the Supreme Court’s opinion, “a substantially across-the-board rate increase.” They provide for very specific and limited rate adjustments and do not affect the railroads’ rate structure generally.
Aside from this erroneous interpretation of statutory terms, it appears to me that with regard to 357 and 368, the ICC was in effect applying retroactively the standards of the Staggers Act which became effective subsequent to final action of the Public *1107Service Commission of Indiana (PSCI), the proceedings of which were not challenged by the railroads before the PSCI. As I have indicated above, there is no disagreement that the railroads published the tariff supplements simply to put into effect previous general rate increases but this was only to the extent that they had been disallowed by the 1979 and 1980 orders of the PSCI. These rulings of the PSCI hearing were final, complete, and legal as of the time they were issued. The Commission, by approving the post-Staggers petitions of the railroads, judged the final decisions of the PSCI by the new standards of the Staggers Act. The ICC ruling in effect retroactively rescinded decisions which the ICC had no power to do at the time the decisions were entered.
As the Supreme Court said in Greene v. United States, 376 U.S. 149, 160, 84 S.Ct. 615, 621, 11 L.Ed.2d 576 (1964), quoting from Union Pacific Railroad Co. v. Laramie Stock Yards Co., 231 U.S. 190, 199, 34 S.Ct. 101, 102, 58 L.Ed. 179 (1913):
“the first rule of construction is that legislation must be considered as addressed to the future, not to the past . . . [and] a retrospective operation will not be given to a statute which interferes with antecedent rights . . . unless such be ‘the unequivocal and inflexible import of the terms, and the manifest intention of the legislature.’ ” [Footnote omitted.]
Accord, United States v. Estate of Donnelly, 397 U.S. 286, 90 S.Ct. 1033, 25 L.Ed.2d 312 (1970); Taliaferro v. Stafseth, 455 F.2d 207, 209 (6th Cir. 1972); Farmington River Power Co. v. FPC, 455 F.2d 86, 90 (2d Cir. 1972). The error of the Commission in applying the standards of the Staggers Act retroactively is particularly manifest because the railroads had an adequate remedy against the decisions of the PSCI at that body had they felt themselves sufficiently aggrieved.
The increases published in the tariff supplements are not new, prospective applications. Rather, the railroads have filed supplements to existing tariffs that, in the two instances, were the subject of prior proceedings and adverse rulings by the PSCI. It would seem, absent an explicit declaration of purpose, Congress could not have intended to oust state commissions of jurisdiction to decide matters intimately related to prior rulings simply by permitting the railroads to denominate a subsequent charge a “general increase,” particularly when it was not. The railroads’ actions here, in filing supplements to tariffs heretofore declared to be unlawful, are a collateral attack upon the prior lawful rulings of a state agency, and the Commission’s decision condoning such actions and approving such increases is an unconscionable abuse of agency discretion.
The majority opinion recognizes that “[i]f the increases are treated as general, then a host of pre-Staggers Act state agency hold-downs can be circumvented by the expedient of refiling the held-down portion of the tariff, with appropriate notice, before the ICC.” I have no way of knowing how much other intrastate tariff situations may be identical with those involved in the present case which are the only ones with which we are dealing but at least the circumvention by the expedient of refiling after the effective date of the Staggers Act is exactly what happened here.