SALT LAKE CITY CORPORATION and METROPOLITAN WATER DISTRICT OF SALT LAKE & SANDY, Respondents, v. MARK C. HAIK and PEARL RATY, as Trustee of the Pearl Raty Trust, Petitioners.
No. 20190091
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF UTAH
May 18, 2020
2020 UT 29
Heard January 15, 2020;
Attorneys:
Shawn E. Draney, Scott H. Martin, Danica N. Cepernich, Salt Lake City, for respondents
Paul R. Haik, Eden Prairie, MN, for petitioners
CHIEF JUSTICE DURRANT authored the opinion of the Court, in which ASSOCIATE CHIEF JUSTICE LEE, JUSTICE HIMONAS, JUSTICE PEARCE, and JUSTICE PETERSEN joined.
CHIEF JUSTICE DURRANT, opinion of the Court:
Introduction
¶1 The Pearl Raty Trust (the Trust) seeks water for an undeveloped lot it owns in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Although the lot sits in unincorporated Salt Lake County, it falls within Salt Lake City’s water-service area. According to the Trust, this makes it an inhabitant of Salt Lake City and thereby entitled to the city’s water under
Background
¶2 This case is the latest episode in the “ongoing saga” between Mark Haik and Salt Lake City (the City) over water access in Little Cottonwood Canyon.1 The protagonist in this chapter is not Mr. Haik, however, but the Pearl Raty Trust, which owns property next to Mr. Haik’s in the Albion Basin subdivision. Both the Trust and Mr. Haik seek water from Salt Lake City so they can develop the lots they own in this subdivision.
¶3 In February 2014, Salt Lake City brought a quiet title action against Mr. Haik and the Trust’s predecessor-in-interest, Butler Management Group, over their water rights in the Albion Basin. In response, Butler
¶4 The Trust’s counterclaim rests on the fact that, although the Albion Basin subdivision is not part of Salt Lake City proper, it falls within the city’s approved water-service area.4 In 1992, the City filed a change application, approved by the State Engineer, allowing it to divert up to 15.75 acre-feet of water annually for thirty-five homes in the subdivision. But even though this gave the City approval to deliver water to the Basin, it is not currently delivering enough water for the Trust and Mr. Haik to develop their empty lots. According to the Trust, the Salt Lake Valley Board of Health will not issue a building permit until its lot is able to receive 400 gallons of water per day. But the City currently supplies only fifty gallons per day to four cabins that already exist in the Basin.
¶5 According to Salt Lake City, even though it has approval to supply the Basin with 400 gallons of water per day, its distribution system does not extend far enough up Little Cottonwood Canyon to reach the Trust’s and Mr. Haik’s lots. In other words, although the Trust’s lot technically falls within Salt Lake City’s approved water-service area, the City lacks the infrastructure to actually supply the lot with water. Nonetheless, the Trust claims to “stand[] ready, willing, and able to finance the costs of extend[ing]” Salt Lake City’s distribution system up the canyon.
¶6 With this context in mind, we now turn back to the Trust’s counterclaim, which the district court dismissed in February 2017. According to the district court, the counterclaim “boil[ed] down to a dispute over the proper interpretation of the term ‘inhabitant[s]’ as used in
¶7 The Trust appealed this ruling and the court of appeals affirmed.5 In so doing, the court of appeals held that, because the Trust’s lot is “beyond the limits” of Salt Lake City, forcing the city to provide its lot with water “would cut directly against that section’s purpose.”6 We granted certiorari to determine whether the court of appeals erroneously interpreted
Standard of Review
¶8 “On certiorari, we review the court of appeals’ decision for correctness, focusing on whether that court correctly reviewed the trial court’s decision under the appropriate standard of review.”7 The district court’s decision to grant Salt Lake City’s motion to dismiss “is a question of law,” which the court of appeals reviewed “for correctness.”8
Analysis
¶9
¶10 The Trust argues that this provision obligates Salt Lake City to supply water to its Albion Basin lot. This argument hinges specifically on the word “inhabitants” in the phrase “supplying its inhabitants with water.”10 The Trust claims it is an inhabitant of Salt Lake City because its lot falls within the City’s approved water-service area. And because it is an inhabitant of Salt Lake City, the Trust argues,
¶11 According to the Trust, the court of appeals erred in adopting the district court’s interpretation of “inhabitants.” Instead of endorsing the district court’s “common sense” interpretation, the Trust argues, the court of appeals should have conducted an originalist analysis to determine what the word “inhabitants” meant to the Utahns who ratified our constitution in 1896. And it claims that, were we to perform this analysis, we would conclude that the original understanding of
¶12 The Trust correctly points out that when interpreting the Utah Constitution, we “seek to ascertain and give power to the meaning of the text as it was understood by the people who validly enacted it as constitutional law.”12 This approach, which “has been our primary mode of constitutional interpretation since the founding of the state,”13 requires us to determine the “original public meaning” of the constitutional provision in question at the time it was adopted.14 And while there is “no magic formula”
¶13 But despite making several arguments based on the text of
I. The Trust is Not an Inhabitant of Salt Lake City Under the Plain Language of Article XI, Section 6
¶14 The Trust focuses its argument on the second clause of
¶15 In matters of constitutional interpretation, “our job is first and foremost to apply the plain meaning of the text.”17 “Therefore, our starting point in interpreting a constitutional provision is the textual language itself.”18 When interpreting statutory text, prior case law instructs us to “consider the entire text, in view of its structure and of the physical and logical relation of its many parts.”19 In accordance with this principle, we note that “[a] pronoun, relative pronoun, or demonstrative adjective generally refers to the nearest reasonable antecedent.”20 The Trust’s interpretation is inconsistent with this rule.
¶16 In advancing its interpretation of
¶17 And, building on this reading, the Trust argues that the term “water rights” encompasses a city’s approved water-service area because cities hold the rights to the water in their respective service areas. So, under the Trust’s proposed interpretation, the phrase “supplying its inhabitants with
¶18 This interpretation violates the rule that a pronoun usually refers to the nearest reasonable antecedent. Under the Trust’s interpretation, the pronoun “its” would not refer to the nearest reasonable antecedent—“municipal corporation“—but to “water rights,” a noun that appears at the beginning of the sentence.21
¶19 Salt Lake City, on the other hand, advances an interpretation of
¶20 The ratification-era definitions of “inhabitant” provided by the parties also support this conclusion. The Trust cites to a nineteenth-century edition of Webster’s American Dictionary, which defines “inhabitant” in two ways.23 First, it defines an inhabitant as a “dweller,” or one who is “distinguished from an occasional lodger or visitor.”24 It alternately defines inhabitant as “one who has a legal settlement in a town, city or parish.”25 In response, Salt Lake City points us to the first edition of Black’s Law Dictionary, published in 1891. This dictionary defines “inhabitant” as “[o]ne who resides actually and permanently in a given place, and has his domicile there.”26 The Trust is not an inhabitant of Salt Lake City under any of these definitions.
¶21 The Trust does not fall within these definitions because it does not actually reside in Salt Lake City or even in the Albion
¶22 The Trust argues that even if it does not “dwell” in Salt Lake City, it has “legal settlement” there because, under a 1903 Utah statute, those who “continuously resided in any county in [Utah] for a period of four months . . . gain[ed] lawful settlement in such county.”28 In other words, the Trust claims that the voters who ratified Utah’s constitution would have considered the Trust an inhabitant of Salt Lake City because it has owned a lot in the Albion Basin for more than four months, giving it “lawful settlement” in the Basin under the 1903 statute. But this statute has no application here. It speaks only to how a person acquires lawful settlement in a county, not a municipality. So the Trust is not included in this definition of inhabitant either.
¶23 In sum, none of these ratification-era definitions of inhabitant apply to the Trust. And the antecedent of the phrase “its inhabitants” in
¶24 In advancing its argument that those who ratified our constitution would have considered it an inhabitant of Salt Lake City, the Trust also cites to several portions of Utah’s constitutional convention. We have long endorsed combing “the record of debates during [Utah’s] constitutional convention” for “extrinsic evidence of the framers’ intent.”30 This evidence “can inform our understanding”31 of a constitutional provision’s original public meaning by providing “instances of usage of the words” in question “that are likely to reflect the senses in which the words would have been understood by the public.”32 And after reviewing the framers’ use of the word “inhabitant” throughout the convention proceedings, we are not convinced that the public would have considered the Trust an inhabitant of Salt Lake City at the time of ratification.
¶25 Indeed, when debating
¶26 Several delegates objected to the inclusion of the phrase “at reasonable charges” in this clause. Delegate Brigham Henry Roberts proposed striking out the phrase, arguing that regulating water rates “smack[ed] . . . of legislation.”34 He proposed leaving decisions on water rates to local city councils.35 Others, such as Delegate David Evans, lobbied to keep the phrase so that cities would not “have arbitrary power to make unreasonable charges to the consumers of water.”36 Delegate Franklin S. Richards argued that the phrase struck a balance that would prevent cities from charging “exorbitant” rates, but that would not “prohibit [a] city from charging [any] water rates” altogether.37 After hearty debate, the delegates voted to retain the phrase.38
¶27 Notably absent from this debate is a reference to the meaning of word “inhabitants.” But even though the framers did not discuss the meaning of this term, they did use the word in several other contexts. And taken together, their use of “inhabitant” indicates that the public understanding of the word did not encompass those who—like the Trust—did not live within a city’s formal boundaries or whom a city could not count among its official population.
¶28 At other points during the convention, the framers used the word “inhabitant” when referring to the inhabitants of Utah. This indicates that they understood the term to refer to those living within a jurisdiction’s formal boundaries. For example, when discussing the cost of paying for a convention stenographer, Delegate Moses Thatcher opined that the framers “should have things moved so that our constituents, the inhabitants of Utah, and the voters of Utah, will be satisfied, and with respect to this honorable body of men, that they should keep expenses of this Convention down . . . .”39 And when discussing how to apportion Utah into legislative districts, Delegate Brigham Henry Roberts endorsed a method whereby the legislature would “provide laws for an enumeration of the inhabitants of the State in the year of our Lord, 1905, and every tenth year thereafter.”40
¶29 In addition, when discussing the first draft of
¶30 These references make clear that the framers understood Utah’s inhabitants to be the people living within its borders. Delegate Thatcher’s statement that the framers’ constituents were the “inhabitants of Utah” necessarily implies that Utah’s inhabitants are those living within its formal boundaries, as the framers had no representative arrangement with people living in a different state or territory. Similarly, the proposal by Delegate Roberts to perform an “enumeration” of Utah’s inhabitants involved counting the people who would make up the state’s legislative districts—a practice that, by definition, could not encompass people living outside of Utah.43
¶31 In addition, Delegate Ryan’s proposal to change “citizens” to “inhabitants” in
B. The framers also used the word “inhabitant” when referring to those whom a city can count among its official population
¶32 The framers also used the term “inhabitant” when referring to those whom a city counts among its official population. In discussing the requirements of municipal charters, Delegate Dennis Clay Eichnor “introduced a proposition enabling cities having more than three-thousand inhabitants to frame their own charters.”45 In response,
¶33 The framers’ use of “inhabitants” in these instances strongly suggests that they understood the term to refer to those whom a city can count among its official population. It strains credulity to suggest that those who voted on the Utah Constitution would have viewed an entity such as the Trust—which owns undeveloped property within a city’s water-service area but outside the city’s formal boundaries—as an inhabitant among its formal population.
¶34 In sum, the framers’ use of “inhabitant” throughout the convention provides persuasive evidence that, at the time of ratification, the public understood the word “inhabitants” to mean those living within a jurisdiction’s formal boundaries or whom a jurisdiction counts among its official population. So our review of this historical evidence leaves us unconvinced that this same public would have considered the Trust an inhabitant of Salt Lake City.
III. The 1898 Utah Code Also Indicates That Those Who Ratified Our Constitution Would Not Have Considered the Trust an Inhabitant of Salt Lake City
¶35 We have previously explained that “certain provisions of the 1898 [Utah] Code . . . can provide persuasive evidence about what the people of Utah would have understood our state constitution to mean.”49 The 1898 Code “holds particular significance” in matters of constitutional interpretation “because it was the first effort to codify the law after adoption of our constitution.”50 And although “we do not expect to find a perfect enshrinement of constitutional principles or a dictionary of constitutional terms” when we consult Utah’s first code, it “may help us understand the contemporaneous public meaning of certain constitutional terms and concepts.”51
¶36 In this case, a review of the 1898 Code leaves us unpersuaded that the people who ratified Utah’s Constitution would have considered the Trust an inhabitant of Salt Lake City. Much like the proceedings of the 1895 Constitutional Convention, the 1898 Code provides compelling evidence that the original public meaning of “inhabitants” included only those persons living in a jurisdiction’s formal boundaries or whom the jurisdiction counted among its formal population.
¶37 For example, section 169 of the 1898 Code supports the proposition that “inhabitants” refers to those living within a city’s corporate boundaries. This section, which governed the incorporation of new cities, provided that
When the inhabitants of any part of any county, not embraced within the limits of any city, shall desire to be organized into a city, they may apply . . . to the board of county commissioners of the proper county . . . to be embraced in such city, and shall have annexed thereto an accurate map . . . and state the name proposed for such city, and shall be accompanied with satisfactory proof of the number of the inhabitants within the territory embraced in said limits.52
¶38 In addition, section 10-1-174 of the 1898 Code, which also governs municipal corporations, suggests that “inhabitants” refers to those whom a city counts among its official population. This provision established “three classes” of municipal corporations.55 The first class included “[t]hose cities having twenty thousand or more inhabitants,” the second class included those with “more than five thousand and less than twenty thousand inhabitants,” and the third class included “all other cities.”56 Section 174 is therefore significant because its drafters chose to use the word “inhabitants” when describing the size of a city’s population.
¶39 This decision strongly suggests that the drafters of the first Utah Code did not understand the term to extend to those who, like the Trust, are part of a city’s water-service area but are not counted among its official population. And if Utah’s first legislators would not have considered the Trust an inhabitant of Salt Lake City, we find it difficult to believe that the people they represented would have either. In sum, these sections of the 1898 Code provide compelling evidence that the people who ratified the Utah Constitution would not have considered an entity such as the Trust an inhabitant of Salt Lake City.
IV. The Legal Understanding of “Inhabitant” at the Time of Ratification Did Not Include Entities Like the Trust
¶40 When interpreting the Utah Constitution, we also examine the backdrop of “legal presuppositions and understandings” against which it was drafted.57 Here, this backdrop indicates that the framers of our constitution “toiled in a legal environment”58 where the word inhabitant “ha[d] been construed to mean” many things—“an occupant of land; a resident; a permanent resident; one having domicile; a citizen; [and] a qualified voter . . . .”59 But after reviewing numerous decisions issued around the time of Utah’s statehood, we are persuaded that the term “inhabitants” was largely understood by the public as either a synonym for the word “resident” or as something more “fixed and permanent”60 than residency. We are also persuaded that those who held this understanding would not have considered an entity like the Trust to be an inhabitant of Salt Lake City.
¶41 Many courts tasked with interpreting the word “inhabitant” in the late nineteenth century concluded it was “synonymous with resident.”61 Some reached this conclusion by
¶42 But even when courts found that the words “inhabitant” and “resident” were “not synonymous or convertible,” they did so because “inhabitant” connoted a more permanent relationship with a specific place than “resident.”65 The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, for example, held that the word “inhabitant” in a statute “referring to liability to taxation” meant “one domiciled.”66 But it also explained that in other contexts, the word implied “something more than domicil[e]” because it “import[ed] citizenship and municipal relations,” such as the right to vote.67 And the Court of Appeals of Maryland noted, in a case involving an absconding debtor, that “inhabitant mean[t] a permanent resident,” while “resident” meant “one who resides in a place for an indefinite time.”68
¶43 According to these cases, courts at the time of Utah’s statehood would not have considered an entity such as the Trust to be an inhabitant of Salt Lake City. It is undisputed that the Trust does not reside in Salt Lake City’s corporate boundaries. And as discussed previously, even if those residing in the Albion Basin could be considered inhabitants of Salt Lake City, the Trust does not actually reside in the Albion Basin.69 It merely owns a vacant lot in the hope that someone
¶44 “When we look to the historical record, we hope that it resembles a Norman Rockwell painting—a poignant, straightforward, and easy to interpret representation“—rather than a “Jackson Pollock” where we “find ourselves staring at the canvas in hopes of finding some unifying theme.”70 This case strikes us as a Rockwell. Neither the plain language of article XI, section 6 nor the significant historical evidence before us supports the Trust’s claim that it would have been considered an inhabitant of Salt Lake City in 1896.
Conclusion
¶45 The Trust fails to persuade us that the people who ratified Utah’s constitution understood the word “inhabitants” to encompass any person who owned property in a city’s approved water-service area. Indeed, the plain language of article XI, section 6, the proceedings of Utah’s constitutional convention, the 1898 Utah Code, and the interpretations of “inhabitant” adopted by other late-nineteenth century courts all point to the opposite conclusion. We affirm.