Court Opinion

ID: 9652285
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:21:48.913852+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:49.985266
License: Public Domain

*405SPAETH, Judge,
concurring and dissenting:
I agree that we should reverse the order holding that appellee need not contribute to the support of her two sons. In my opinion, however, we should also reverse the order requiring appellant to continue to contribute $20.00 a week to the support of his daughter.
As the majority opinion decides, appellant met his burden of proving a change of circumstances, both with respect to himself and appellee. This change may be summarized, in round figures, as a reduction in appellant’s income to half of what it was, and an increase in appellee’s income to twice what it was.
In affirming the lower court’s order continuing appellant’s $20.00-a-week payment, the majority says that “[i]t is not unreasonable to require appellant, receiving over $6,900 per year, to contribute a minimal share of the expenses of raising his daughter.” At 403. I do not see how the majority can be sure that it is not unreasonable. Whether $20.00 is a “minimal share” of the expenses of raising the parties’ daughter is a question that cannot be answered on the record as we have it, for the record contains only appellee’s summary statement that she spends $171.66 a week to raise the daughter. Unexplained, this statement is not acceptable. The child is only thirteen or fourteen years old.
If the question of the daughter’s support were taken in isolation, I might agree that $20.00 a week sounds roughly right in the circumstances. The parties’ incomes are roughly the same; a teenaged daughter probably costs at least $40.00 a week to feed, clothe, and care for; and thus the $20.00-a-week payment is roughly right as appellant’s one-half contribution towards the daughter’s support. However, the question of the daughter’s support was not below, and is not here, the only issue in this case. Rather, in the consolidated action, the question was, and is, the parties’ respective obligations to their three children. To affirm one order and to reverse the order, as the majority does, will result in piecemeal resolution of what is a unitary problem.
*406The better way to solve this problem, I believe, would be to reverse both orders. Then, after determining in one proceeding the reasonable expense to appellant of raising the two sons, and to appellee of raising the daughter, the lower court could proceed to an equitable allocation according to the parties’ respective incomes. By affirming the order as to appellant, the majority has in effect already determined how one side of this equation should read, with the result, I am afraid, that on remand it will prove impossible to make the equation balance.