Court Opinion

ID: 9686134
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 15:30:47.646792+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:15.321329
License: Public Domain

SCOTT, Justice
(concurring in the result only):
I agree with the result of the court’s action in this case. The plaintiffs will now have an opportunity to prove that the county was negligent in supervising the Ellef-son day care center. I disagree, however, with the avenue the court takes in reaching its result. I therefore write separately.
I.
The court first determines that the county, by inspecting day care facilities for li-censure, is an “employee of the state” and therefore immune under the state tort claims act, Minn.Stat. § 3.736, subd. 3 (1984). Such a holding is, I believe, the product of a contorted construction of the tort claims act.
In grappling with the complex issue of governmental tort liability, the state legislature enacted legislation covering claims filed against state government. It passed a separate act dealing with claims filed against local governments. The state tort claims act defines “state” as “the departments, boards, agencies, commissions and officers in the executive branch of the state of Minnesota.” The law explicitly provides that the term does not include “a city, town, county, school district, or other local governmental body.” Minn.Stat. § 3.732, subd. 1(1) (1984) (emphasis added). The tort liability of local government is dis*845cussed in the municipal tort liability act, Minn.Stat. § 466.01-15 (1984). The statute states:
For the purposes of sections 466.01 to 466.15, “municipality” means any city, whether organized under home rule charter or otherwise, any county, town, public authority, public corporation, special district, school district, however organized, county agricultural society organized pursuant to chapter 38, public library, regional public library system, multicounty multitype library system, or other political subdivision.
Minn.Stat. § 466.01, subd. 1 (1984) (emphasis added).
The legislature has drawn a distinct line between the tort liability of the state and the tort liability of -local government. The court today blurs that distinction by holding that, in this case, the county was “acting on behalf of the state in an official capacity” and was therefore an “employee of the state.”
In narrow situations and for specific purposes, the legislature has chosen to make a local governmental entity a “state employee.” For example, the legislature recently enacted the following provision:
Municipalities, when performing, as required or mandated by state law, inspections or investigations of persons prior to the issuance of state licenses, are employees of the state for purposes of the indemnification provisions of section 3.736, subdivision 9. A municipality is not, however, an employee of the state for purposes of this section if in hiring, supervising, or continuing to employ the person performing an inspection or investigation for the municipality, the municipality was clearly negligent.
Act of March 25, 1986, ch. 455, § 90, 1986 Minn.Laws 884 (codified at Minn.Stat. § 466.132) (emphasis added). The fact that the legislature made a county an employee of the state only for the purposes of the indemnification provisions of Minn.Stat. § 3.736, subd. 9, certainly implies that if it had desired to further expand the scope of state employees to cover the situation presented in this case, it would have done so. This court should therefore decline to do what the legislature did not.
I would hold that the county, in this case, is not afforded the protection of the state tort claims act. The source of any protection must be the municipal tort liability act, Minn.Stat. § 466.01-.15, and that act provides no immunity to the county in this case.
II.
Applying the principles of Cracraft v. City of St. Louis Park, 279 N.W.2d 801 (Minn.1979), the court in this case determines that the county owed a “private” or “special duty” to the children enrolled in the day care facilities inspected by the county (as opposed to a duty merely to the general public). Because I believe Cra-craft resurrects the sovereign immunity doctrine, a doctrine that this court laid to rest in Spanel v. Mounds View School District No. 621, 264 Minn. 279, 118 N.W.2d 795 (1962), and in Neiting v. Blondell, 306 Minn. 122, 235 N.W.2d 597 (1975), I cannot concur in the court’s analysis.
The outcome of this and other governmental liability cases should not rest on this court’s determination that a certain governmental function either serves to protect the general public, thereby immunizing the governmental entity from liability, or serves to protect specific members of the public, thereby affording such privileged members the opportunity to prove that the government was negligent. When this court begins to so distinguish certain functions of government it treats the governmental defendant differently than the private defendant, who may actually be performing functions identical to those of the government. If a private firm was awarded a government- contract to inspect day care facilities in a certain geographical region and this firm, whose profits were derived from such inspecting, allegedly failed to use reasonable care in carrying out those functions, this court would not seek to somehow determine whether the private firm was immune from liability based on *846the nature of its business; rather, the court would apply traditional principles of tort law. The Restatement (Second) of Torts explicitly states:
One who undertakes, gratuitously or for consideration, to render services to another which he should recognize as necessary for the protection of a third person or his things, is subject to liability to the third person for physical harm resulting from his failure to exercise reasonable care to protect his undertaking, if * * * his failure to exercise reasonable care increases the risk of such harm * *.
Restatement, Torts 2d, § 324A. Is not the risk of injury increased by an inspector’s failure to exercise reasonable care in undertaking the inspection service? This should be the focus of the court’s inquiry in all such liability cases, whether or not the defendant is a governmental entity.
The court, instead, seeks to distinguish between a public and a private duty. If it finds only a public duty, as it did in Cra-craft and Hage v. Stade, 304 N.W.2d 283 (Minn.1981), the governmental tortfeasor is off the liability hook, but if it finds a private or special duty, as in this case, a remedy exists for the wrong. To me, such a determination is a conclusion rather than an aid to analysis. It is, in effect, a policy determination rooted in principles of sovereign immunity. As Professor Prosser noted:
The statement that there is or is not a duty begs the essential question — whether the plaintiff’s interests are entitled to legal protection against the defendant’s conduct. It is therefore not surprising to find that the problem of duty is as broad as the whole law of negligence, and that no universal test for it ever has been formulated. It is a shorthand statement of a conclusion, rather than an aid to analysis in itself * * *.
W. Prosser, Law of Torts, 325 (4th ed. 1971).
I would abolish the public-private duty distinction and simply apply the tort principles enunciated in section 324A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts.1
YETKA, Justice.
I join in the special concurrence of Justice Scott.

. Supreme Courts in other jurisdictions have recognized that the public-private duty distinction raises the spectre of the defunct sovereign immunity doctrine and have, accordingly, declined to adopt it. See Stewart v. Schmieder, 386 So.2d 1351 (La.1980); Wilson v. Nepstad, 282 N.W.2d 664 (Iowa 1979); Adams v. Stale, 555 P.2d 235 (Alaska 1976); Coffey v. City of Milwaukee, 74 Wis.2d 526, 247 N.W.2d 132 (1976).