Court Opinion

ID: 9567024
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:47:01.731397+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:50:43.005667
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Justice
(dissenting).
Concededly the result permitted by the main opinion is a desirable one, but I respectfully dissent as to the route and reason of arrival. There is no argument against the contention that water is our economic life blood, and its conservation and use are vital. But of equal importance is the requirement that in accomplishing our desired result, we should adhere to constitutional fundamentals and refuse to condone any artifice or subterfuge designed to circumvent constitutional provisions relating to debt limits of local governmental units. It seems to me that in the instant case, we indulge in a method of arriving at a desired result by ignoring the Constitution, essaying the history and geology of the projects and concluding that it is constitutional because it is a filie and desired thing. Apparently we assume that should we decide contra, the *429water involved forever would be lost to those desiring to conserve and use it. Not so. Everything proposed could be accomplished through a private or even public corporation, with subscribing stockholders and users.
No matter how you slice it, this case in the last analysis does this: It permits a local government unit, without a vote of the inhabitants, to apply for and receive an annual 1,000 acre feet of water for use by the inhabitants, who, without a vote, are bound to pay for it. It allows the local unit to permit a legislative creature, the conservancy board, to promise to pay for the project and hence the water it produces, and allows the local unit to sit by and take advantage of the board’s promise to pay, without creating any technical debt on the part of the city. It then permits the 3rd party statutory creature rather than the local unit, to tax the inhabitants of the local unit far beyond the debt limit of the unit in any amount necessary to guarantee and satisfy the promise of the board. In other words, the conservancy board has, as a practical matter, actually promised nothing, but by a strange statute, the inhabitants of the city or town, without having a chance to vote on the matter, are made guarantors of the board’s paper promise, to the extent that their property might be levied upon and sold to insure that such promise (which now you do and now you don’t see) be kept. Everyone agrees that this could not be done directly by the city because of the constitutional debt limit. The main opinion, however, says such circuity of technique satisfies constitutional requirements. I would say the Constitution has not been satisfied, it has been circumvented, emasculated, and ignored.
After this decision, what is to prevent the legislature from eliminating constitutional debt limitations altogether by creating a dummy board, authorized to promise anything under any kind of a proposed project, and with power to back up that promise with an absolute power to tax local citizens, perhaps against their will, without their consent and without any opportunity to voice their choice by suffrage? The answer is that there is nothing to prevent it, and we may as well tear out the pages of the Constitution relating to debt limitations on local governmental units. It would seem to the writer that the main opinion gives to the legislative branch of government an absolute power to delete, amend, modify, recognize or ignore the Constitution as hereafter it may choose.
WOLFE, C. J., being disqualified, does not participate herein.