Court Opinion

ID: 9558625
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 17:13:55.512838+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:28.830408
License: Public Domain

SUPPLEMENTAL OPINION ON MOTION FOR REHEARING.
MOLLOY, Judge.
The appellants have moved this court to reconsider its decision rendered in this case on August 17, 1966, advancing several grounds in support of their motion. All of these grounds have been previously advanced in the appellants’ briefs and were disposed of in the opinion written, with two exceptions. These pertain to the contentions made that this court should take judicial notice of the purported fact that the shopping center which is the subject of this litigation was sold sometime after the trial below for more than the full cash value determined by the lower court and that this court should give only prospective application to its opinion.
Immediately prior to the issuance of our decision herein, the appellants had filed a petition to strike and dismiss Count II of the plaintiffs’ complaint. This petition was denied by this court without an expression of its reasons for so doing. The grounds for this petition were the same as those now advanced on the motion for rehearing pertaining to the doctrine of judicial notice.
The motion for rehearing is accompanied with a copy of what purports to be a newspaper article in a local newspaper, dated June 17, 1966, which reports that there had been a sale of the Campbell Plaza Shopping Center for “ * * * more than 1.2 million.”
Appellants now state:
“This Court in this opinion has taken judicial notice of the fact that construction costs from the time of trial to the present time have steadily increased. The Court, therefore, can also take judicial notice of the sale as it appeared in the newspaper.”
Other than whatever authority there might be in this reference to this court’s own opinion in this case, there is no authority whatsoever cited by the appellants which remotely suggests that a private sale such as reported in the June 17, 1966, newspaper article is a proper matter for judicial notice.
We believe the following to be a proper statement of the law in this state as to matters of which judicial notice may be taken:
“In order for any tribunal, whether it be judicial or quasi judicial, to take judicial notice of any fact, it must be so notoriously true as not to be subject to reasonable dispute or must be capable of immediate accurate demonstration. (57 Harvard Law Review 273) A high degree of probability of the truth of a particular proposition cannot justify a tri*69bunal in taking judicial notice of its truth. (57 Harvard Law Review 274) A fact of which a court may take judicial notice must be indisputable. This being true it follows that evidence may not be received to dispute it.” Phelps Dodge Corporation v. Ford, 68 Ariz. 190, 196, 203 P.2d 633, 638 (1949)
Under this doctrine, our Supreme Court has sanctioned the judicial noticing of such well-known economic facts as that wages are increasing, Whyte v. Industrial Commission, 71 Ariz. 338, 227 P.2d 230 (1951), that there was a general business depression commencing in 1929 and continuing to the time of the opinion released in Taylor v. Kingman Feldspar Co., 41 Ariz. 376, 18 P.2d 649 (1933), and that real property in close vicinity to the riverbed of the Salt River has marginal value for residential purposes, City of Scottsdale v. Municipal Court of Tempe, 90 Ariz. 393, 368 P.2d 637 (1962). Under these authorities, we believe it not inappropriate that this court in its opinion took judicial notice of the rising costs of improvements on real estate.
However, we note that in our opinion we did more than merely take note of rising costs of construction, in that we postulated that because of such rising costs, “ * * * it is therefore probable that a method of using original cost less depreciation would usually result in a value less than current full cash value.” Impliedly, we have by this statement assumed that a 2 per cent depreciation would be adequate to adjust for the decrease in full cash value of improvements resulting from obsolescence and other factors influencing depreciation. In this regard, we believe that we overstepped the permissible limits of judicial notice under the foregoing authority. The statement in regard to judicial notice is unnecessary for the opinion rendered, and accordingly we withdraw this statement pertaining to judicial notice from our opinion.
Under this doctrine of judicial notice, we believe that it would be completely improper for this court to take judicial notice of a private sale as reported in a newspaper article. Equally defeating to the appellants’ claims in this regard, it must be remembered that we are an appellate, not a trial court. An event such as this, which purportedly occurred long after the trial of this action, even if of such general notoriety as to be the subject of judicial notice, should not be the predicate for the reversal of a decision reached on the basis of evidence presented to the trial court. 5 C.J.S. Appeal and Error, § 1487, p. 777 (1958) ; 5 Am.Jur.2d, Appeal and Error, § 728, pp. 171 et seq. (1962). To hold otherwise would be to cause well-advised litigants to appeal every decision of a trial court, regardless of how correct the decision rendered might be on the basis of the evidence then available, in the hope that while the appeal was in progress some event might occur which would prove that the decision rendered was incorrect.
The appellants ask further that the decision rendered be made prospective only and that adequate time he allowed to the defendant-assessor in which to make the “transition.”
If we were modifying or overruling a previous judicial decision, or if we were ordering a complete revampment of the assessment rolls, a process that would require substantial time to accomplish, this request would have some merit. We are doing neither. We believe that the Supreme Court of our state made it crystal-clear in prior decisions of that court, particularly Southern Pacific Company v. Cochise County, 92 Ariz. 395, 377 P.2d 770 (1963), that the practice of arbitrarily assigning various percentages to the cash value of different classes of property in making assessments is a practice directly in violation of law. The Southern Pacific opinion was rendered in January of 1963. We do not believe that our opinion modifies or extends this decision as far as the use of percentages is concerned.
As far as the use of construction cost as the procrustean measurement of value, there have been no prior decisions in this *70state, but the case law of the country, as we have pointed out in our opinion, appears to be unanimous that such a practice is illegal under statutes similar to ours. When the rights of a taxpayer are established by explicit statutory law, as in this case, we question our authority to deny or postpone relief, unless the financial stability of the taxing body is threatened with destruction as in the Southern Pacific case. We are not convinced that the granting of relief to the taxpayer in this case will substantially impair the financial integrity of either this county or this state.
The motion for rehearing is denied.
KRUCKER, C. J., and HATHAWAY, J., concurring.