226 Wis. 647 | Wis. | 1938
The following opinion was filed December 7, 1937:
On this appeal the facts are undisputed, and the issues involved are only questions of law. Since 1924 the
Instead, he contends that because the full amount of his salary was never actually paid to him so as to come into his possession, the amounts contributed, which he seeks to recover herein, cannot be considered voluntary contributions, but must be deemed deductions from his salary, which were unlawful because contrary to public policy. He relies upon Schuh v. Waukesha, 220 Wis. 600, 605, 265 N. W. 699, in which the city, pursuant to a resolution adopted by its council, during six months in 1933, deducted forty per cent of the city engineer’s salary as fixed by an ordinance for that year; and then, after he had refused to accept the sixty per cent balance in each of those months, the city finally required him to enter into a compromise agreement, under which it withheld twenty per cent of his official salary, and paid only the balance thereof during the rest of his term. In respect to those facts we said, “It is clear here that the city, pursuant to resolution, retained a full forty per cent; that in order to get his salary the plaintiff was obliged to make a compromise by which the city retained only twenty per cent.” And upon those facts we concluded that, “The circumstances of this case are such that by no stretch of the imagination can the plaintiff be said to have made a voluntary contribution to the city. The plaintiff is entitled recover the amount withheld from him under such circumstances.” However, those conclusions are not applicable in the case at bar, because it is undisputed that the plaintiff and' all of the other police officers voluntarily agreed to make the contributions in question; that they did so to have the existing salary schedules continue in order to protect, for their benefit, their pension rights, so far as they were based on those schedules; and that their contributions enabled the city to avoid reducing those schedules and their pension rights, although the accounting
However, as we said in Schuh v. Waukesha, supra, “The case should not be made to turn upon the mere mechanics of the operation.” As a matter of accounting, it would probably have been more in accord with the method contemplated under the agreements to enter the full amount of the departmental salaries on the expenditure side of the city’s annual budget, and then enter the estimated total of the contributions on the revenue side, instead of accomplishing the same ultimate result by only entering on the .expenditure side of the budget the net amount of the salaries after the deduction of the estimated contributions. However, under the accounting procedure followed by the director of finance, who was also acting as the agent of the police officers, the desired end result of avoiding any reduction in the authorized salary schedules was fully achieved. That achievement and the resulting protection and preservation of the departmental pension rights, rather than the mere mechanics of the operations or accounting methods adopted to accomplish those results, were the material and controlling matters. It follows that the judgment must be affirmed.:
Judgment affirmed.
A motion for a rehearing was denied, with $25 costs, on February 15, 1938.