Plaintiffs, taxpayers in Bergen County, one resident within the other without the proposed BergenHackensack Sanitary Sewer District, seek a judgment under the provisions of R. S. 2 :26-66, et seq.; N. J. 8. A. 2:26-66, determining the validity of an act of the legislature entitled; “An act creating the Bergen-Hackensack Sanitary Sewer District, creating an authority to manage the same, and prescribing the powers and duties thereof and of other public bodies in connection with the construction and operation of sewers and sewage disposal facilities in said district, and providing ways and means for paying the costs of construction and operation thereof, and to repeal chapter fifteen of Title 58 of the Revised Statutes,” approved May 3d, 1945 (chapter 300 of the Public Laws, 1945; R. S. 58:15A-1, et
The pollution of the Hackensack Eiver by sewage and industrial wastes has been a matter of grave public concern for many years. Prom time to time during the past nineteen years the problem in its various phases has been studied, with the ultimate view of eliminating the pollution. In 1926 by chapter 173 of the Public Laws the legislature prohibited the pollution of the river above the mouth of Bellmans Creek and placed the enforcement thereof in the hands of the State Department of Health, B. 8. 58:10-42, et seq.; N. J. 8. A.
The Bergen-Hackensack Sanitary Sewer District Authority consisting of five members resident within the sewer district, to be appointed by the board of chosen freeholders of Bergen County, is created and constituted a body politic and corporate with perpetual succession as a governmental instrumentality for the purpose, among others, of the protection of public safety, health and welfare, with power to sue and be sued, to adopt and use a corporate seal, to borrow money or contract debt, to issue negotiable bonds and to provide for the rights of the holders thereof, and with the right, power and authority to acquire, use, hold and dispose of all property, real and personal, and to make and perform all contracts and do all acts and things and with all other powers, proper or necessary, to design, finance, construct, acquire and operate such a system of trunk, intercepting and outlet sewers, pumping and ventilating stations, treatment plants and other plants and structures as in its judgment will provide the most effectual and advantageous plan or method for relieving the Hackensack Biver, and its tributaries and other rivers and streams, whether navigable or otherwise, within the sewer district, from pollution and for preventing pollution of the same and for carrying out and effectuating the purposes and plan provided for. Municipalities within the district are prohibited from entering into contracts or agreements for the construction or operation of sewage disposal plants or other sewerage facilities for the use of more than one municipality except upon the written consent and approval of the Authority. The Authority is directed, with all practical speed, to prepare a project report with maps, designs and costs which shall show a proposed plan or method of construction of the district sewer system, which project report must be submitted to the State Board of Health for approval of the proposed district sewer system as a sanitary measure. The Authority is authorized to negotiate and enter into contracts with municipalities and private sewer companies and industries within the sewer district, and with other municipalities and private sewer
The County of Bergen is authorized to pay such amounts as may be agreed upon on the orders of the Authority, for the purpose of assuring money to pay its costs and expenses in preparing the project report and of doing all other acts and things authorized by the act up to the time of the commencement of the construction or acquisition of the district sewer system. The money so advanced by the freeholders of Bergen County shall be repaid by the Authority out of the proceeds of the sale of any bonds which may be issued by the Authority.
An examination of the entire act, as by a reference to the provisions thereof it will more particularly appear, discloses a governmental scheme for the elimination of the pollution of the Hackensack Eiver within the district, in the protection and promotion of the public health, safety and general welfare. The purpose of the act is to provide the means, within the designated area, of establishing, maintaining and operating a public work for the public purpose of taking up the problem of the disposal of sewage of each named municipality at the point where that municipality lays it down, through a proposed instrumentality of the state.
The dispositive question is whether this enactment is obviously a private, special or local bill within the constitutional interdiction.
“As applied to legislation of this character a law is special or local, as contradistinguished from general, in the sense of the prohibitory clauses in this paragraph of the constitution, which embraces less than the entire class of persons or places to whose condition such legislation would be necessary or
“A law is special in a constitutional sense when, by force of an inherent limitation, it arbitrarily separates some persons, places or things from others upon which, but for such limitation, it would operate. The test of a special law is the appropriateness of its provisions to the objects that it excludes. It is not, therefore, what a law includes that makes it special, but what it excludes. If nothing be excluded that should be contained the law is general. Within this distinction between a special and a general law the question in every case is whether any appropriate object is excluded to which the law, but for its limitations, would apply. If the only limitation contained in a law is a legitimate classification of its objects it is a general law. Hence, if the object of a law have characteristics so distinct as reasonably to form, for the purpose legislated upon, a class by itself, the law is general, notwithstanding it operates upon a single object only; for a law is not general because it operates upon every person in the state, but because every person that can be brought within its predicament becomes subject to its operation.” Budd v. Hancock, Comptroller, 66 N. J. L. 133; 48 Atl. Rep. 1023.
“Interdicted local and special laws aTe all those that rest on a false or deficient classification; their vice is that they do not embrace all of the class to which they are naturally related; they create preference and establish inequalities; they apply to persons, things or places possessed of certain qualities or situations, and exclude from their effect other persons, things or places which are not dissimilar in these respects.” Van Riper v. Parsons, 40 N. J. L. 1.
“The purpose of the prohibition against ‘special or local’ laws is not to prevent legislation where there is but ons individual to be dealt with. The purpose is to prevent unfounded discrimination where there are two or more individuals to be
“The tost of the generality of a law adopted is that it shall embrace all and exclude none whose conditions and wants render such legislation equally appropriate to them as a class. * * * The question whether any particular statute is local or special must be determined not upon its compliance with a legislative classification, but upon whether, having regard to the character of the legislation and the limitation upon it contained in the act, the statute is or is not a general law as defined by the courts.
“ ‘In determining whether this act is general, within this meaning (that is, whether the class is composed of all municipalities which, considering the purposes of the legislation, are distinguished from others by qualities or characteristics such as to make the legislation appropriate to them and inappropriate to others), its purpose is first to be considered, and it is then to bo determined whether the municipalities on which it operates have substantial distinctions segregating them from other municipalities, and evincing that such legislation is germane to them and not to others.’ In every case the primary consideration in the process of determining whether a particular law, local or special on its face, is a general law in the sense of the constitution is the consideration whether the classification adopted is based on those substantial grounds which justify the limitation of its enactments to one set of municipal bodies and the exclusion of others.” Warner v. Hoos, 60 N. J. L. 482; 38 Atl. Rep. 449.
The sewerage district created by the act does not embrace the entire natural drainage area of the Hackensack Eiver within the State of Hew Jersey. It designates a smaller area through which a segment of the river runs, and sets it apart as a sewer district in which pollution of the river is to be eliminated. By its terms it excludes the remaining drainage area and the municipalities located therein, to which although but for the limitation, the objects, purposes and provisions of the act would manifestly be appropriate. If the sewerage district set apart for this laudable purpose embraced the drainage area of the river for its full length within the state, it would
A postea, pursuant to Supreme Court rule 113, N. J. S. A. tit. 2, containing any necessary finding of fact and the determination of the points of law involved in the decision, may be prepared.