Court Opinion

ID: 9862801
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 02:11:56.011682+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:33:24.300133
License: Public Domain

Pasi-iman, J.
(concurring and dissenting in part). I concur in the majority’s conclusion, that those seeking to withdraw from a township must bear the burden of proof as to the reasonableness vel non of the parent municipality’s denial of consent to deannexation.
*607It is not appropriate, however, to speak of the introduction into evidence of the petition for deannexation together with resolution of denial of consent as constituting a prima facie case sufficient to require the township to “come forward with proof” of specific economic and/or social harm that would result from deannexation. The result of deannexation must of necessity carry with it a concomitant loss of ratables, thereby occasioning, in the ordinary situation, economic injury to the township. Similarly, withdrawal will always disrupt, in varying degree, the social fabric of a community. It must always fall, therefore, to the potential secessionists to prove that in fact the economic or social consequences of deannexation will be de minimis.
Further, the majority overstates its claim that the fact of specific economic or social harm will suffice to bar deannexation; as above, all deannexation will produce that harm, and no deannexation could ever succeed were such injury the gauge of the propriety of the township’s refusal of consent.
I would affirm the principle stated in West Point Island, that the reasonableness of municipal action is at issue in these cases. I do not believe that the plaintiffs should be confined, as the majority suggests, to an attempt to negative proof of economic and social injury, a task in which they can never succeed. Instead, the plaintiffs should prove that the extent of potential harm to the parent municipality is insignificant, or alternatively, that actual harm to the township is so far outweighed by the beneficent results to the secessionist sector, that refusal of consent was palpably unreasonable.
This burden on the plaintiffs is a heavy one. In the case sub judice, the economic injury to the parent township was obvious, and social injixry was not a frivolous claim. Those seeking deannexation could not negative the proofs of actual injury; nor could they offer any compelling countervailing consideration, such as the alleviation of any existing oppressive condition resulting from their location in Demarest; *608nor could they point to any significant relevance of factors which generally bear on deannexation, such as isolation, availability of services, symmetry, unity of interests, etc. See 62 C. J. S. Municipal Corporations § 48, pp. 141-145; 62 A. L. B. 1011, “Facts Warranting Extension or Reduction of Municipal Boundaries.”
Accordingly, I concur in the judgment of reversal.
Passman, J., concurs in result.
For reversal — Acting Chief Justice Jacobs, Justices Hall, Sullivan, Pashman and Clifford and Judges Con-ford and Collestee—7.
For affirmance—None.