Court Opinion

ID: 9549324
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:16:14.737834+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:20:08.607639
License: Public Domain

WILKINS, Justice
(concurring generally with dissent):
I concur generally with the dissent of Mr. Justice Maughan, and add these comments.
What must be understood here, in my opinion, is that this statute, benign though the motives may have been the enacting it, is not some harmless detour of a minor legal principle. It is rather a major assault upon Article XIII of the Constitution of this State and the caselaw following and guarding it, both of which forbid inequality of taxation (except where specifically authorized in our basic document) — and indeed forbid that inequality regardless of the form of the mechanism employed to accomplish it. And it is no convincing argument, I submit, to say that Article XIII is, not violated here because none of the funds to be refunded by Section 59-26-1 originate from or are identified with property tax funds. Why? The Legislature in Article •XIII is the very body specifically charged with the solemn duty to “. . . provide by law a uniform and equal rate of assessment and taxation on all tangible property (at § 3 of Art. XIII) — and that duty is imposed without, of course, implanting the seeds of its own destruction by legally permitting the Legislature to accomplish indirectly a result when Article XIII expressly and directly forbids that result.
In short, though it may be gratifying and socially worthy to see public funds generously distributed by the State of Utah to tens of thousands of property owners (and *261renters) in this State, that worthiness cannot, in my view, magically imbue the legislation here with constitutional validity.