Court Opinion

ID: 9644756
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 21:04:16.524851+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:17.910185
License: Public Domain

HECHT, Justice,
dissenting.
The Court holds that cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants were required by statute until 1987 to pay certain fire department employees overtime when they were not actually working but were on call. The Court defines “on call” to include time when employees were free to go about their affairs as long as they could be contacted by radio or telephone and could come to a fire scene within a reasonable time, allowing for preparation and travel. An hour after being summoned, more or less, was a reasonable response time for on call employees, according to the uncontro-verted testimony in this case. The effect of the Court’s holding is to require the public to pay fire department employees for not working — for time at home, at church, at the movies, at the park, shopping, mowing the grass, visiting friends, eating, and in bed asleep — for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whenever they could be called to return to work. Thus, the City of Tyler must pay Antony Tijerina not only for all the regular and overtime hours he actually spent on the job, which it has already done, but additional overtime for the hours he spent on call during the 2 ½ years he was employed. Tijerina claims over $85,000 for 6,160 hours on call, which amounts to over nine extra hours per day, five days a week. Adding this sum to what Tijerina, a novice fire inspector in his mid-20’s, has already been paid will result in his being compensated more than Tyler’s Fire Chief with 30 years’ experience, more than its Police Chief, more than its assistant city manager, and more than most of its department heads. In a related case, Eckles v. City of Lubbock, 846 S.W.2d 825 (Tex.1992) (per curiam), each of the three fire department employees claims at least $500,000 in overtime pay for on call time. This misapplication of public funds is required, according to the Court, because the Legislature clearly intended for taxpayers to pay public employees for not working. This is nonsense.
The Court’s holding is based upon the language of Tex.Rev.Civ.Stat.Ann. art. 1269p, § 6, before it was amended in 1987.1 *830The former statute provided that the hours during which certain members of the fire department were “required to remain available for immediate call to duty by continuously remaining in contact with a fire department office by telephone or radio” were to be included “in computing the hours in the work week”. The pre-1987 statute did not define the phrase, “available for immediate call to duty”, or the phrase, “continuously remaining in contact”. Both phrases are crucial to this ease and to a proper construction of the statute. The Court reads the former to mean being able to respond within some reasonable amount of time, allowing for preparation and travel. The Court does not consider the phrase to require that the employee remain at the fire station, although many employees were required to do so, and the amended statute now makes this requirement plain. The Court reads the latter phrase to mean being within reach by radio or telephone should the fire department choose to try to contact the employee. The Court does not consider the phrase to require the employee to remain actually on the radio or telephone to the fire department at all times, or even to call in periodically.
As the Court reads the statute, it “unambiguously” and “unequivocally” required the City of Tyler to pay Tijerina for time during which he concedes he was free to do as he pleased, as long as he could be reached by radio or telephone and could come to a fire scene within a reasonable time of being summoned. A reasonable time for Tijerina was an hour or so, according to all the testimony in the record. He was not required to remain at the fire station or even to call in. Ordinarily he could not leave the vicinity of Tyler while on call, but whenever he wished to do so, he simply asked a fellow worker to be on call in his place. He admits that he never had any difficulty leaving town whenever he wanted to. Although he characterizes being on call as an “inconvenience”, the truth is that he was at home asleep for most of the time he now wants to be paid, and paid not just his regular time wage, but time-and-a-half overtime.
It strikes me as odd that the Legislature would ever have required cities to pay fire department employees more for being off duty and on call than for actually being on the job. This is so unlikely, it seems to me, that the Legislature surely could not have intended it without saying so very clearly. Yet no such clear expression of intent can be found in the statute. One could stretch “available for immediate call to duty” to mean “available for reasonable call to duty”, but immediacy usually demands a much more urgent reaction, particularly in fire departments. It is less of a stretch, I suppose, to equate “continuously remaining in contact” with “continuously remaining contactable”, although the two concepts are certainly not congruent. The Court’s reading of the two key phrases in the statute is dubious at best, yet on such reading the Court reaches the highly unlikely conclusion that the Legislature unambiguously and unequivocally intended that fire department employees be paid more for less work.
The Court’s reading of the statute makes on call time prohibitively expensive. A city would have been better off to have hired additional employees to sit at the station at full pay than to pay overtime at time-and-a-half rates to an employee at home asleep. The Legislature might as well have outlawed on call time altogether as to make it so expensive. It certainly could have done so. That it did not casts serious doubt on whether it intended to accomplish the same thing by means so subtle that Tijerina never realized he was being paid less than half what he was due the entire 2½ years he worked for the City of Tyler. The Court’s statutory construction is hardly reasonable, let alone unambiguous.
The Court’s improbable view also creates a conflict in the language of the former statute. The statute provided that fire department employees should be paid overtime if required to work more than regular hours. Being on call, as the Court has defined it, was compensable only if it was “work”; if it was not, then the statutory provisions are in conflict. The Court argues that the Legislature must have considered employees on call to be working, or *831it would not have included on call hours in computing the work week. But this argument assumes that being on call entailed only a reasonable rather than immediate response time, and only contactability rather than actual contact. A fire inspector at home asleep is not at work in any reasonable sense of the word, simply because he may be telephoned to report to a fire scene. The Court’s reference to Kierstead v. City of San Antonio, 643 S.W.2d 118, 121 (Tex.1982), does not bolster its argument. There we said that “[a]ny kind of official work assignment ... is compensable as overtime.” Being on call may be an official assignment, but in the circumstances of this case, it is not work.
The Court also argues that if being on call is not work, then it was meaningless for the Legislature to include on call hours in calculating a work week. Again, the flaw in the Court’s argument is that being on call need not be defined so broadly as to include time when an employee’s activities are largely unrestricted. If being on call were work, then the Legislature clearly intended that it be compensated, as is apparent from the 1987 amendments to the statute which provided that on call time is to be included in a work week only when an employee
is required to remain ... on call on the employer’s premises or so close thereto that he cannot use the time effectively for his own purposes. The time a person is required to leave a telephone number where he or she may be reached, or is required to remain accessible by radio or pager is not considered as hours worked.
Act approved June 20, 1987, 70th Leg., R.S., ch. 933, § 1, 1987 Tex.Gen.Laws 3124 (amending former art. 1269p § 6(c). The Court argues that by this amendment the Legislature clearly intended a change in the law. The amendment could as well be a clarification as a change, but if it is a change, it remains unclear why the Legislature ever meant for an employee to be compensated for off-duty time which he could use effectively for his own purposes.
I think it indicative of the weakness in the Court’s position that it distorts the caselaw interpreting the statutory provisions in issue. The Court states that the statute has been twice held to mean exactly what it says, citing Harrison v. City of Victoria, 730 S.W.2d 119 (Tex.App.—Corpus Christi 1987, writ ref’d n.r.e.), and City of Brownsville v. Salazar, 712 S.W.2d 577 (Tex.App.—Corpus Christi 1986, no writ), two eases closer to its own view. Actually, all five cases which have construed the statute have concluded that it means what it says. Even the City of Tyler argues that the statute means what it says. That is not the issue, but merely a strawman easily overcome. The issue, rather, is what does the statute say, and on this issue the weight of authority opposes the Court’s position. The two courts of appeals in this case and Eckles, which is also reversed by this Court today, have taken a directly contrary position, as did the court of appeals in City of Dallas v. Spainhouer, 758 S.W.2d 611 (Tex.App.—Dallas 1988, writ ref’d n.r.e.) (en banc). We are certainly not bound by any of these lower court decisions. To the extent they are important in our analysis, they do not, on balance, support the Court’s position, and its claim to the contrary is demonstrably false.
Finally, the Court dismisses the argument that its view is absurd as being nothing more than a disagreement over the policy chosen by the Legislature. This, too, is merely rhetorical sleight. According to the Court, the underlying issue is “whether a court should invalidate legislation when a judge declares this ‘strikes me as odd.’ ” Ante at 828. If this were the issue, the Court and I would be in agreement that a judge may not invalidate legislation merely because he disagrees with it. But of course, this is not the issue. The question is not whether we are to enforce a statute that is clearly absurd as written, but whether we are to read a statute that is not entirely clear as being absurd. The Court misstates the issue either because it cannot understand this distinction, or because it is afraid of the weakness of its position. The Court concedes that the statute as it construes it is not sound policy. But the Court attempts to blame this unsound policy, and its enormous burden on the public, on the Legislature. The Legislature is not so clearly at fault. The stat*832ute does not by its express language require payment for on-call time which the employee is free to spend on personal matters. This result is based entirely upon the Court’s construction of the statute. The statute may also be construed, as I have suggested, to avoid what we all appear to agree is unsound policy. The Court has not answered why it will not do so.
I do not dispute that the wisdom of legislative policy may not always commend itself to the judiciary. When such disagreements arise, we are obliged to enforce legislative will so far as it may be permitted to extend. The issue is not whether this Court must enforce a clear statute, but whether the Court’s reading is clear. I do not question the authority of the Legislature to require taxpayers to pay fire inspectors for 40 regular hours and 128 overtime hours each week, so that they are paid 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unlike any other public employee in the state, and more than any other city employee. The Legislature could have done this and then in 1987 changed its mind. It could have; but I do not believe it did.
Accordingly, I dissent.
CORNYN, J., joins in this dissenting opinion.

. This statutory language was originally enacted in 1959, Act approved June 1, 1959, 56th Leg., R.S., ch. 356, § 1, 1959 Tex.Gen.Laws 781-782 (amending Act approved March 23, 1945, 49th Leg., R.S., ch. 38, 1945 Tex.Gen.Laws 55, formerly codified as Tex.Penal Code art. 1583-1 § 6), and was moved to Tex.Rev.Civ.Stat. art. 1269p in 1973, Act approved June 14, 1973, 63rd Leg., R.S., ch. 399 § 5, 1973 Tex.Gen.Laws 995, 996f, amended by Act approved June 14, 1985, 69th Leg., R.S., ch. 725, § 1, 1985 Tex.Gen.Laws 2522-2523. Article 1269p was again amended in 1987, Act approved June 20, 1987, 70th Leg., R.S., ch. 933, §§ 1, 3, 1987 Tex.Gen.Laws 3124-26, and Act approved Aug. 4, 1987, 70th Leg., 2d C.S., ch. 63, § 1, 1987 Tex.Gen.Laws 203, and recodified that year as Tex.Loc.Gov't Code § 142.-001, Act approved May 1, 1987, 76th Leg., R.S., ch. 149 §§ 1, 49, 1987 Tex.Gen.Laws 707, 881-82, 1307 (enacting Code and repealing art. 1269p). The provision was again renumbered in 1989 as §§ 142.0015 and 142.0017, Acts approved March 1, 1989, 71st Leg., R.S., ch. 1, §§ 1(a), and 24(a), (b), 1989 Tex.Gen.Laws 1, 26-31.