Court Opinion

ID: 9733359
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 17:04:37.7837+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:40.771616
License: Public Domain

FILES, J., Dissenting.
It seems to me that plaintiff did none of the things listed in section 4104 as grounds for a penalty. Plaintiff, a general contractor, promised to perform the entire work. Apart from the statute, this contract could have been performed by plaintiff itself, or by subcontractors. When plaintiff elected not to use a subcontractor, it performed its obligation to defendant in an alternate way.
Plaintiff did not substitute any person as subcontractor in place of the subcontractor designated in the original bid. Plaintiff did not permit any “such subcontract" to be assigned, because there was no “such subcontract." Plaintiff did not sublet any portion of the work to an unauthorized person.
Plaintiff has built the sedimentation tanks and defendant has the use of them. I see no reason to deprive plaintiff of its pay by extending the penalty statute to a state of facts not within its terms. Even if the interpretation of the statute should be based upon its supposed purpose instead of upon the words alone, I can find no justification for applying it here. The apparent purpose of the legislation is to give the public agency the opportunity to pass upon the qualifications of those who do the work. But plaintiff, having been awarded the general contract, surely has met acceptable standards of responsibility. Plaintiff was at all times directly responsible to the public agency for the successful completion of the entire work, and would have been required to see it through if the approved subcontractor should have failed. There is a perfectly good reason why the Legislature did not make the penalty applicable to performance by the general contractor.
The judgment should be reversed.
Appellant’s petition for a hearing by the Supreme Court was denied May 22, 1963.