115 N.Y.S. 755 | N.Y. App. Div. | 1909
This is a taxpayer’s suit to restrain the mayor, comptroller and chamberlain of the city of Hew York from paying to the Public Service Commission of the first district, or to any person at its direction, the moneys required to be appropriated and paid by section 14 of chapter 429 of the Laws of 1907, upon the ground that any such payments would be illegal official acts, and a waste of the funds of the city. Plaintiff applied upon the summons and complaint for an injunction pendente lite. The application was denied. From the order entered thereon plaintiff appeals.
The complaint attacks the constitutionality of the Public Service Commissions Law, being chapter 429 of the Laws of 1907, entitled, “ An act to establish the public service commissions and prescribing their powers and duties, and to provide for the regulation and control of certain public service corporations and making an appropriation therefor.” The complaint presents fourteen alleged .violations of the State Constitution and objections under three separate provisions of the Federal Constitution.
The appellant has argued upon this appeal but two of the constitutional questions so raised : First, that the act offends section 16 of article 3 of the State Constitxition which provides that “Ho private or local bill which may be passed' by the Legislature, shall embrace .more than one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title; ” and, second, that portion of section 10 of article 8 of the Constitxition of the State which provides that “Hor shall any such county,
First. Section 14 of the act provides as follows: “1. The salaries of the commissioners, the counsel to the commission, and the secretary to the commission in the first district shall be audited and allowed by the State Comptroller, and paid monthly by the. State Treasurer upon the order of the Comptroller out of the funds provided therefor. All other salaries and expenses of the commission of the first district shall be audited and paid as follows : The board of estimate and apportionment of the city of Hew York, or other board or public body on which is imposed the duty and in which is vested the power of making appropriations of public moneys for the purposes of the city government shall, from time to timé, on requisition duly made by the Public Service Commission of the first district, appropriate such sum or sums of money as may be requisite and necessary to enable it to do and perform, or cause to be done and performed, the duties in this or in any other act prescribed, and to provide for the expenses and the compensation of the employees of such commission, and such appropriation shall be made forthwith upon presentation of a requisition from the said commission, which shall state the purposes for which such moneys are required by it. * * * It shall be the duty of the auditor and comptroller of said city, after such appropriation shall have been duly made, to audit and pay the proper expenses and compensation of the employees of said commission, other than its counsel and secretary, upon vouchers therefor, to be furnished by the said commission, which payments shall be made in like manner as payments are now made by the auditor, comptroller or other public officers of claims against and demands upon such city; and for the purpose of providing funds with which to pay the said sums, the comptroller, or other chief financial officer of said city, is hereby authorized and directed to issue and sell revenue, bonds of such city in anticipation of receipt of taxes and out of the proceeds of such bonds to make the payments in this section required to be made. The amount necessary to pay the principal and interest of such bonds shall be included in the estimates of moneys necessary to be raised by taxation to carry on the business of said city, and shall be made a part of the tax
“ 2. All salaries and expenses of the commission in the second district shall be audited and allowed by the State Comptroller and paid monthly by the State Treasurer upon the order of the Comptroller, out of the funds provided therefor,”
The argument is that the provision requiring the city to pay the expenses and salaries of the employees of the Commission for the first district, other than its counsel and secretary, makes this act a local bill, that thereby the act embraces more than one subject and a subject not expressed in its title, and so violates section 16 of article 3 of the Constitution. That constitutional provision "was designed to remedy and prevent two legislative evils: (1) The grouping of two or more separate matters in a single private or local bill, and (2) the failure to express in the title of the bill the single subject to which it relates.
“ The purpose of the sixteenth section was, that neither the members of the Legislature, nor the public should be misled by the title; not that the latter should embody all the distinct provisions of the bill in detail.” (Sun Mutual Ins. Co. v. Mayor, etc., of New York, 8 N. Y. 241.)
“ The degree of particularity with which the title of an act is to express its subject is not defined in the Constitution and rests in the discretion of the Legislature. * * * An abstract of the law is not required in the title.” (Brewster v. City of Syracuse, 19 N. Y. 117.)
“ The learned counsel for the appellant insists that the act of 1866
It may be said in passing that the reason for the original enactment
While undoubtedly á general bill, yet, in pursuance of. the legislative policy to send to the cities affected for greater precaution all bills which, from any point of view, might be claimed to come within that section of the Constitution, it was so sent.
But this act is neither a private nor a local bill. The general subject of the act is not local, that is, .confined to a particular municipality or particular portion of the State. Obviously, it is not a private bill. Such a bill applies only to individuals or corporations, and not to municipalities of- the State. As distinguished from private the
It contains no provisions separate and distinct from and not germane to the general subject-matter. The scheme of the act is to create public service commissions for the regulation and control of certain public service corporations. Every section of the act bears directly upon the general scheme. The subject-matter is clearly indicated in the title, and that title is more detailed and explicit ■ than that sustained in Matter of Knaust (supra).
There is no constitutional objection to embracing several separate matters in a general as distinguished from a private or local bill.
The Public Service Commissions Law is a general act the provisions of which cover the whole State. By section 3 two public service districts are created. The first district includes the counties of Mew 'York, Kings, Queens and Bichmond; the second district, all other counties of the State. Each Commission, by section 4] is to consist of five members appointed by the Governor, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, and each Commissioner shall be a resident of the district for which he is appointed. The Commissioners are removable by the Governor. They are required to make annual reports to the Legislature. Their salaries, together with those of their counsel and secretaries, are paid out of the State treasury. Each Commission may hold meetings of the Commission at any time or place within the State (§ 11). They may -issue subposnas which may be served anywhere in the State, and they may examine witnesses under oath in any part of the State (§§ 11, 19). The Commissioners are State officers. The fact that for convenience oi administration the State is divided into two districts, and that the members of the Commission when appointed are to be residents of their respective districts, no more affects the question than does the division of the State into judicial districts and the requirement that the justices of the Supreme Court shall be elected by the electors residing in the respective judicial districts.
By section 5 the jurisdiction, supervision, powers and duties of the Commission in the first district shall extend (1) to railroads and street railroads lying exclusively within that district, and to the persons oi corporations owning, leasing, operating or controlling the
. The Commission, therefore, for each district, has jurisdiction over the railroads and street railroads whose lines lie within both districts ; as to street railroads, the First District Commission has jurisdiction over the transportation of persons or property from a point within either district to a point within the other district and over the persons or corporations operating said roads, but the Second Dis
This act is the latest expression of the public policy of the State in reference to public service corporations. The right of the State to regulate and control corporations has always been asserted and recognized; especially so in respect to those corporations upon whom the right to employ the governmental power of condemning private property for public use and the right .to use the public streets have been conferred. This act by article 5 abolishes the former Board of Railroad Commissioners, the Commission of Gas and-Electricity, Inspector of Gas Meters, and the Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners, and transfers all the powers and duties of such boards and officers theretofore conferred and imposed by statute upon this new Commission, divided into two bodies for convenience of administration, as the Appellate Division, while one court, is divided into four departments for such convenience. The Public Service Commissions have jurisdiction -over every corporation in the State of the classes specified, for the benefit of every individual within the State, by controlling and regulating the use of these public utilities. The citizen of Buffalo who travels to Mew York, or the citizen of Mew York who travels to Buffalo, is equally interested in the proper management and control of the railroads, steam and street, which transport him.
The objection is urged that the provision for payment of the salaries and expenses of the employees of the Commission for the first district by the city of Mew York is a local act and that, being joined in one bill with general legislation, it offends the section of the Constitution under consideration.
In People ex rel. Griffin v. Mayor, etc., of Brooklyn (4 N.Y. 419) Ruggles, J., after quoting from Chief Justice Marshall in Providence Bank v. Billings (4 Pet. 514) and McCulloch v. Maryland (4 Wheat. 428),said : “* * * The power of taxation and of apportioning taxation, or of assigning to each individual his share of the burthen, is vested exclusively in the Legislature, unless this power is limited or restrained by some constitutional provision. The power of taxing and the power of apportioning taxation are identical and inseparable. Taxes cannot be laid without apportionment; and the power of apportionment is, therefore, unlimited, unless it be restrained as a part of the power of taxation. There is not and, since the original organization of the State government, there has not been any such constitutional limitation or restraint. The people * * " have not ordained that taxation shall be general, so as to embrace all
In Gordon v. Cornes (47 N. Y. 608) by chapter 466 of the Laws of 1866, the Legislature had authorized the establishment of four additional normal or training schools and authorized different localities to make proposals for the establishment of such schools therein. Chapter 21 of the Laws of 1867, as amended by chapter 96 of the Laws of 1867, after reciting that the trustees of the village of Brockport had made proposals in accordance with the provisions of the first mentioned act, for the establishment of one of these schools, which had been accepted by the proper authorities, provided that the trustees were authorized, directed and empowered to carry such proposals into effect and raise money necessary for that purpose by levying and collecting taxes or borrowing the same on bonds of the village. Such taxes, it was provided, should be collected in the same manner as other taxes in said village, and that the assessment upon which such tax was levied should be in accordance with the last completed assessment roll of the village. The constitutionality of this legislation being attacked, Rapallo, J., said: “The first alleged ground of objection to the validity of this act is that the institution for which the money was to be raised was not a local one, but was for the equal benefit of the whole State, and that the assessment ought to be imposed with equality upon all property within the State. There can be no doubt of the correctness of the general proposition, that the principle upon which taxation is founded is that the taxpayer is supposed to receive just compensation in the benefits conferred by government, and in the proper
In Genet v. City of Brooklyn (99 N. Y. 296) Andrews, J., said: “The power of taxation being legislative, all the incidents are within the control of the Legislature. The purposes for which a tax shall be levied; the extent of taxation ; the apportionment of the tax; upon what property or class of persons the tax shalboperate ; whether the tax shall he general or limited to a particular locality, and in the latter case the fixing of a district of assessment; the method of collection, and whether the tax shall he a charge upon both person and property, or only on the land, are matters within the discretion of the Legislature and in respect to which its determination is final. * * The learned counsel for the intervenors is compelled to admit that the Legislature may distribute the burden of public improvements on its own notions of policy, its own sense of justice, and its own assumptions of benefit.”
In Cayuga County v. State (153 N. Y. 279) the court had under consideration an act providing for the reimbursement of Cayuga
The argument that a provision, special in locality, makes an act pro tanto local, has been rejected repeatedly by the courts. Such a rule would make it impossible for the Legislature in many cases to pass a law adapted to the diversified conditions and means of the different localities of the State. In Matter of Wallace (71 App. Div. 284) chapter 658 of the Laws of 1900, amending the act relating to taxable transfers of property, was under consideration. By that law it was provided that the State Comptroller should appoint five persons in the county of New York, two persons in the county of Kings and one person in the county of Erie to act as appraisers. The salaries of these appraisers were provided for and the act
In People ex rel. Einsfeld v. Murray (149 N. Y. 367), where the constitutionality of the Liquor Tax Law (Laws of 1896, chap. 112) was before the court, Andrews, Ch. J., said : “ It is a general State excise law with such special provisions and adaptations to localities as to the Legislature seemed proper. Whether the law should be uniform in its application to the cities of the State, or whether a discrimination should be made in the excise tax as between New York and any other city, and the extent of the discrimination was in the discretion of the Legislature.”
That law is in many respects analogous to the Public Service Commissions Law. It abolished all excise boards, State and local; it transferred their powers to one State board; it made special provisions for every large city of the State.
No one would suggest that the General Election Law, chapter 909 of the Laws of 1896, as amended by chapter 95 of the Laws of 1901, was not a general act, and yet the amending act repealed sections 358 to 371, inclusive, of the Greater Hew York charter (Laws 'of 1897, chap. 378) and established an entirely new board of elections for the city of Hew York with peculiar qualifications, provided for the assumption of the powers and duties of' the former board, salaries were fixed and all expenses made a charge against the city and upon proper vouchers to be paid by the
That portion of section 14 of the act under consideration provide ing for the manner of payment of the expenses and salaries of employees was taken in hcec verba from the ¡Rapid Transit Commission Act,
This statute does not offend that section because, within the meaning of that language of the Constitution, no indebtedness is to be incurred. The money is to be raised by taxation in the manner in which other moneys are raised by taxation for other governmental purposes, and the provisions for the issuance of revenue bonds in anticipation of the collection of taxes is expressly eliminated from such prohibition by the section of the Constitution itself under consideration. It has been the general policy to meet current expenses by taxation; to distribute the payment for permanent public improvements over a period of years by the issuance of bonds of municipalities, or as denominated in the city of Hew York corporate stock. It is the indebtedness so created that the provision is aimed at. The purposes for which the money here under consideration is to be raised and applied aré precisely the same as. salaries and current expenses of all other governmental agencies, and to be met in the same way from taxation.
In McGrath v. Grout (171 N. Y. 7) Gray, J., said: “The indebtedness which a county is inhibited from incurring, in our opinion, means one which is created for purposes other than for the maintenance of the political organization. It has no reference to the
To conclude, the act is general, not private or local, it contains- no matter not germane to.the title thereof, the provision'for payment of' the expenses of the Commissions created is properly included in the act creating them, the provision requiring payment of a portion thereof by taxation upon a specified district is but a matter of apportionment well within the taxing power of the Legislature, and no indebtedness within the meaning of section 10 of article' 8 of the Constitution is' to be incurred. The act is a valid exercise of legislative power.
It follows, therefore, that the order appealed from should be affirmed, with costs and disbursements to the respondent.
Ingraham, McLaughlin, Laughlin and Scott, JJ., concurred.
.Order affirmed, with ten dollars costs and disbursements.
Chap. 367.—[Rep.
People ex rel. City of Rochester v. Briggs.—[Rep,
See Const. (1846) art. 3, § 16.— [Rep.
See Laws of 1891, chap. 4, § 10, as amd. by Laws of 1894, chap. 752.—[Rep;