60 F. 203 | 8th Cir. | 1894
after stating the case as above, delivered the opinion of the court.
The city of Alma contests the validity of the judgment rendered by the circuit court, mainly on the ground, that its counsel did not enact an ordinance providing for the submission to the electors of the proposition to issue improvement bonds. It is claimed that under the charter of the city a resolution of the council, such as was in fact adopted, was not the proper mode of inviting an expression of the popular will touching an issue of improvement bonds, and that, because a resolution was passed in lieu of an ordinance, all subsequent proceedings taken thereunder were invalid, and the bonds are void. Incidentally, it is suggested that as the charter provided that improvement bonds “shall be payable in not less than ten years, nor more than twenty years from the date of their issue,” bonds like those now in suit, which were “to be paid in twenty years after date,” do not conform to the charter, and are therefore invalid. We may dispose of the hitter suggestion with the remark that, in our judgment, a bond made payable “in twenty years after date” is, by the common acceptation of those terms, a bond which matures at the expiration of 20 years, and that neither the payor nor the payee can enforce the payment of a bond thus drawn until the lapse of that period. We have no doubt that the bonds in suit conform to the charter, so far as respects the time of payment.
The other contention, that an ordinance should have been passed, in lieu of a resolution, rests upon no charter provision which expressly requires an ordinance to be passed for the purpose of obtaining an expression of the popular will, but is founded altogether upon inferences drawn from various charter provisions which do in fact require the council to enact ordinances for certain well-de-flned purposes. For example, the charter of the city empowered the council to enact ordinances “to levy and collect taxes for general revenue not to exceed ten mills on the dollar * *; to open and improve streets * ⅞ ⅞ and alleys, make sidewalks, build bridges, culverts, and sewers.” Another section of its charter prescribed the form of all ordinances that might be passed by the council, and directed them to be published in a certain way, and to be entered in an ordinance book. Another section of the charter, and the one most relied upon, provided, in substance, that the mayor and council should have no power “to appropriate or issue any scrip, or draw any order on the, treasurer for any meuey, unless the same had been appropriated or ordered by ordinance.” And a proviso to this section enacted “that no ordinance * * * for borrowing * * * money, levying taxes, or appropriating money, shall be of any validity unless a majority of all the councilmen * * * shall vote for such ordinance, and such vote shall
In support of its contention that the bonds in suit should be held to have been issued without authority of law, much stress is laid on a recent decision of this court in National Bank of Commerce v. Town of Granada, 54 Fed. 100, 4 C. C. A. 212, 10 U. S. App. 092; but an examination of the opinion and statement in that case will show that it is readily distinguishable from the case at bar. In the case last referred to the town was required to act in obedience to laws which are materially different from the charter provisions involved in the present suit. But it is more important to observe that the law^s of Colorado which were then under consideration, in terms, required the town to act by ordinance, and it had assumed to so act but in doing so it had utterly failed to comply with certain mandatory provisions of a state statute, which rendered the pretended ordinance utterly void, as this court then held. The ordinance in question had neither been recorded, nor authenticated by the signature of the presiding officer, nor published as the statute of Colorado required, by reason of which facts it had not become operative. Nothing was decided in the last-mentioned case which can be said to con