Court Opinion

ID: 9654033
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 18:02:47.622347+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:05.012501
License: Public Domain

BIIYAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting in part).
I dissent from so much of the majority opinion as holds the trustees of tho internal improvement fund liable to pay for tax certificates issued upon the failure of landowners to pay drainage taxes. .The trustees in my opinion hold the certificated lands in trust for the bondholders and other creditors of the drainage district. The Compiled General Laws provide that lands upon which drainage taxes are delinquent may be sold, and if there is no private bidder, shall be “bid off” by the tax collector for the trustees to be held by them for tho two-year period allowed for redemption “in like manner and with like effect as lands sold to the State for non-payment of State and county taxes are held by the State.” Comp. Gen. Laws 1927, § 1541. In the case of a sale for nonpayment of ordinary state and county taxes, if there are no private bidders, the land is bid off by the tax collector for the state. Section 972. Two years are allowed for redemption, hut the owner may redeem at any time before the land is sold to another. Hightower v. Ilogan, 69 Fla. 86, 68 So. 669. When land in the drainage district has been bid off for the trustees for tho nonpayment of drainage taxes, the title vests in the trustees, but they hold it subject to the owner’s right of redemption which continues until the land is sold. The sale must he for at least as much as accrued taxes, and, in the event of such a sale, but not otherwise, tho trustees are required to pay the delinquent drainage taxes. If they were purchasers in their own right, their obligation to pay would naturally arise as of tho date of the tax sale, and would not ho conditioned on a future sale. The provision of section 1, e. 9119, Laws of 1923, subjecting land within the drainage district held by the trustees to drainage taxes, refers to land owned by the trustees in their own right, and not to land held in trust under tax certificates. If it had been the intention of the Legislature to bind the trustees as purchasers of land upon which drainage taxes had not been paid, there should and doubtlessi would have been a plain and unequivocal provision to that effect. It is not to be inferred that the' Legislature intended to impose a burden as great as is here contended for merely because it adopted existing provisions of law applicable to the holding and disposition of lands by the state upon default in the payment of ordinary taxes.
Upon tire other questions involved, I concur in the opinion of the majority.