Court Opinion

ID: 9855825
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 06:31:40.285406+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:37:11.872554
License: Public Domain

Hill, C. J.
(dissenting)—I agree with the majority that the attempted distinction between a retirement pension and a pension for disability is without merit. I agree, too, that the word “rank,” as used in the firemen’s relief and pension *287act, includes the position of “fire chief.” I cannot agree that “the limitation of pensions to one hundred twenty-five dollars per month as provided by the 1935 amendment to the firemen’s relief and pension act was unconstitutional in so far as the respondents or respondents’ husbands were concerned.
The gist of the majority opinion to which I take exception is found in the following two paragraphs:
“The specific question, therefore, to be decided is whether the 1935 amendment to the firemen’s relief and pension act results in permissible (i.e., reasonable and equitable) changes in the act as it existed prior to the amendment as applied to respondents or respondents’ husbands, as the case may be.
“In our opinion, the 1935 amendment provides no corresponding benefit to the employee to counterbalance the loss of pension rights resulting from the imposition of the one hundred twenty-five dollars maximum pension limitation. The amendment, considered as a whole, is clearly detrimental as applied to respondents, or respondents’ husbands. We find nothing in the record before us, nor in the legislative records, which indicates that the one hundred twenty-five dollars maximum pension limitation was dictated by some overriding public policy.”
I could agree with the conclusion of the majority if the question of whether the changes in the 1935 act were reasonable and equitable were one to be determined by the process of balancing benefits and detriments between the 1929 act and the 1935 act on the high inflationary plateau of 1958; but, it seems to me, it ought to be determined by balancing benefits and detriments as they seemed to be to the legislature in 1935. We were then in the depths of a depression when one hundred twenty-five dollars a month represented a comfortable income, many pension funds were, or about to become, insolvent, and the legislative problem was to shore up precarious situations.
It will be said that there is none of this in the record, and I readily agree; but neither is there anything in the record which justified the court in believing that it knows better *288in .1958 how to balance the benefits and detriments in the 1929 and 1935 pension acts than did the 1935 legislature;.
I am also convinced that the respondents (or their husbands) had acquiesced in. the modifications which the 1935 act made in their pension contracts for the reasons expressed in my dissent in Bakenhus v. Seattle (1956), 48 Wn. (2d) 695. (beginning at page 703), 296 P. (2d) 536.
I, therefore, dissent and would determine all the pensions involved on the basis of the limitation contained in the 1935 act.