Court Opinion

ID: 9783450
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 19:46:05.893823+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:35:23.202027
License: Public Domain

WILLIAM RAY PRICE, JR., Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. The outcome of this case turns on whether Casey’s Marketing Company d/b/a Casey’s General Stores engages in “processing.” “Processing” is the most generic of terms that the General Assembly could have chosen when writing the energy tax exemption provision in section 144.054.2, RSMo Supp.2010. As the principal opinion points out, “processing” is defined in the statute, and the statutory definition confirms that the General Assembly intended the scope of that word to be as broad as possible:
1. As used in this section, the following terms mean: (1) “Processing”, any mode of treatment, act, or series of acts performed upon materials to transform or reduce them to a different state or thing, including treatment necessary to maintain or preserve such processing by the producer at the production facility....
Section 144.054.1, RSMo Supp.2010. Casey’s mixes pizza dough and cooks pizzas, mixes donut dough and fries donuts, heats other food products, and freezes ice. Under section 144.054.1(l)’s definition, mixing, cooking, frying, heating, and freezing all constitute “processing.” All these activities involve Casey’s performing a “series of acts” on raw “materials” in order to “transform” them into a “different state” in which consumers are willing to purchase them.
The term “processing” is broad, but it is not ambiguous. Its application to the activities in which Casey’s engages could not be clearer. “[C]ourts have a duty to read statutes in their plain, ordinary and usual sense.... Where there is no ambiguity, this Court does not apply any other rule of construction.” MC Dev. Co. v. Cent. R-3 Sch. Dist. of St. Francois Cnty., 299 S.W.3d 600, 604 (Mo. banc 2009) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). The Court’s resort to the maxim of nosci-tur a sociis is, thus, inappropriate here.
Reliance on Brinker Missouri, Inc. v. Dir. of Revenue, 319 S.W.3d 433 (Mo. banc 2010), is also inappropriate. Whether or not Brinker was rightly decided,1 that case is not controlling here because it interpreted a different term appearing in a different statute. In Brinker, the issue was whether a restaurant’s kitchen equipment, tables, chairs and dishes were exempt from the state use and sales taxes. The answer turned on whether those items were “[mjachinery and equipment ... purchased and used to establish new or to expand existing manufacturing, mining or fabricating plants ... if such machinery and equipment is used directly in manufacturing, mining or fabricating a product which is intended to be sold ultimately for final use or consumption.... ” Section 144.030.2(5), RSMo 2000. Neither “plant” nor “manufacturing” were statutorily defined. The Brinker Court held that restaurants are not “plants” and that cooking *7food does not constitute “manufacturing.” But in the instant case, the issue is the interpretation of “processing,” which, as noted above, is statutorily defined and unambiguous.
I would affirm the decision of the Administrative Hearing Commission.

. See Brinker, 319 S.W.3d at 441 (Price, C.J., dissenting).