Court Opinion

ID: 9586746
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:14:28.170869+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:49.259581
License: Public Domain

GRAY and PARKER, Justices
(dissents ing).
Without adopting any view of the prevailing opinion except that part which relates to the general and historical analysis of revenue bonds, we concede reluctantly that there is insufficient basis to hold the questioned legislation to be unconstitutional as it might conceivably apply to permissible,, factual situations, and on the negative approach that an act of the legislature will not be declared unconstitutional unless its unconstitutionality clearly appears, do not challenge the answers given to reserved *91-questions one through five. We do, however, find the opinion particularly fallacious in its statement answering question two, “Inherent in that answer [Cheyenne’s credit is not loaned or given] is a holding that ■no debt against the City of Cheyenne is being contracted.” This court has not heretofore had occasion to pass upon the meaning of “debts” as used in Art. 13, § 3, Wyo. Const., but that word has been defined as obligations or demands arising out of contracts, express, implied or quasi. Ballentine, Law Dictionary, p. 334 (2 ed.). In the instant case, § 11 of Ordinance 1538 provides :
“The provisions of this ordinance shall be deemed to be and shall constitute a contract between the City and holders from time to time of any Bonds and the coupons appertaining thereto and any of said holders may sue, in any action, in mandamus, injunction, or other proceedings, either at law or in equity to enforce or compel performance of all duties or an ■obligation required by this ordinance to be done or performed by said City. * ■ * * »
Perhaps the writer of the opinion here lias accorded his thinking on this subject with that of the Alabama and Iowa courts ■when they have said that the constitutional use of “loan of credit” meant suretyship ■and by that reasoning is saying that a “debt” is not a debt if there is any understanding by which the repayment of the amount is not to involve the use of tax revenues. However, we are unaware of any legal basis for such reasoning, and to us it is unquestionable that the framers of the Wyoming Constitution recognized an elementary principle when in Art. 13, § 3, they restricted the powers of municipal corporations in the contracting of debts except in pursuance of law for public purposes specified by law. Such restriction is consistent with this court’s interpretation of Art. 16, Wyo. Const., “Public Indebtedness,” when we said in Laverents v. City of Cheyenne, 67 Wyo. 187, 217 P.2d 877, 882, 883, that to constitute a debt within the provisions of Art. 16, § 5, “it must be payable in whole or in part, out of the general resources of the municipality.”
Although we see no necessity at this time of addressing ourselves to the premise that judicial notice may be taken of the public economic benefits flowing from new or expanded industry, we recoil from the intimation that the legislature has given carte blanche authority to municipalities to borrow millions of dollars with only a pro forma determination of benefits. Obviously, in the instant case no “new” industry is being brought into Cheyenne, and we fail to find any real indication that this is to be an “expanded” industry. The Senior Vice President of Operations of the Frontier Refining Company stated that the twenty-five-year-old plant’s physical facilities are bordering on competitive obsolescence and for continuance of the Cheyenne operation to be warranted,, substantial improvements and additions are essential; that for the most part the purchase price of some $18,000,000 will be used to discharge the indebtedness of the entire Frontier Refining Company properties ; that if the financing is consummated, approximately $4,500,000 would be expended on the Cheyenne refinery to improve and modernize it and an estimated additional thirty persons then required in Cheyenne. Nothing was presented to show that the obsolescence would be cured by the expenditure of the proposed sum or that the plant would be a successful or going concern if the bonds were issued. We fail to see a situation such as this as comparable to a new or expanded industry, and since the evidence fails to constitute a clear showing that a public purpose is to be served, we would accordingly hold defendant’s charge of error as to the court’s finding to be well taken and reverse the judgment on this ground.