7 Mo. App. 203 | Mo. Ct. App. | 1879
delivered the opinion of the court.
This was an action on a special tax-bill. It appeared on the trial of the cause that the work was done under a city ordinance introduced in May, 1872, as a bill for improving Cass Avenue from Twenty-seventh to O’Eallon Street, and providing for grading, guttering, macadamizing, and curbing the street named in the title, within the boundaries named. On t,his bill was indorsed an estimate of the city engineer, estimating the cost of the work to the city at $2,300 and the cost to the property-holders $4,400. The bill, before its passage, was amended. Its title was changed so as to read: “An ordinance to improve certain streets in the Second District north of the south line of the Sixth Ward ; ” and the body of the bill was altered so as to provide for the grading, guttering, macadamizing, and curbing of a very large number of streets (the mere enumeration of them filling a page of closely written foolscap), and appropriating $55,000 for the cost of the work to the city.
The bill as thus amended was passed, and is the bill under which the work sued for was done. No other estimate of the city engineer was indorsed on the bill than the original estimate of $2,300, — indorsed, as already stated, upon the original bill as first introduced, and before it had grown to more than twenty times its original proportions.
The court, sitting as a jury, declared the law to be, that if the work was done under the contract and ordinance introduced, and if the city engineer did not indorse upon the ordinance an estimate of the entire cost of the work contemplated by the ordinance to be done at the expense of the city, including the work sued for, there can be no recovery in this action. Other instructions were given to the same effect, and the court found for defendant.
The city charter in force when this ordinance was passed provides (Charter 1870, art. 8, sect. 18) that every ordinance requiring such work to be done shall contain a specific appropriation from the proper fund, based upon an estimate of cost to be indorsed by the engineer on the ordinance. It is manifest that this provision of the charter has not been complied with in the present case. No estimate of the cost of the work contemplated by this ordinance was ever indorsed on this bill. The estimate indorsed on the bill is for a very small proportion, apparently less than five per cent, of the work embraced in the ordinance and chargeable by law to the city.
There was, therefore, a total disregard of a charter requirement. The provision of the charter is mandatory. “The courts,” says an eminent writer on constitutional law (Cooley’s Const. Lim. 78), “tread on very dangerous ground when they venture to apply the rules which distinguish directory and mandatory statutes to the provisions
We therefore think that judgment in this case was properly entered for the defendant, as the Council had no power to order this work to be doixe at the expexxse of the pi’operty-holder except in compliance with the existing law.
The judgmeixt is affirmed.