Godheim v. City of Tampa, 82-1845

• Decision Date: 28 January 1983
• Docket Number: No. 82-1845,82-1845
• Citation: 426 So.2d 1084
• Parties: Norman T. GODHEIM, a Taxpayer and Resident of the City of Tampa, Appellant, v. CITY OF TAMPA, a municipal corporation under the Laws of the State of Florida, and Waste Management, Inc., Appellees.
• Court: Florida District Court of Appeals

Page 1084

426 So.2d 1084

Norman T. GODHEIM, a Taxpayer and Resident of the City of Tampa, Appellant, v. CITY OF TAMPA, a municipal corporation under the Laws of the State of Florida, and Waste Management, Inc., Appellees.

No. 82-1845.

District Court of Appeal of Florida Second District.

Jan. 28, 1983.

John R. Bush of Bush, Ross, Gardner, Warren & Rudy, Tampa, and J. Rex Farrior, Jr. and John H. Rains, III, of Shackleford, Farrior, Stallings & Evans, P.A., Tampa, for appellant.

Joseph G. Spicola, City Atty., and Thomas T. Steele of Fowler, White, Gillen, Boggs, Villareal & Banker, P.A., Tampa, for appellee City of Tampa.

H. Lee Moffitt and Debra L. Romanello of Moffitt, Hart & Miller, Tampa, for appellee Waste Management, Inc.

GRIMES, Judge.

This is an appeal from a judgment which dismissed a taxpayer's action against the City of Tampa for lack of standing.

Appellant, a citizen and taxpayer of the City of Tampa, brought a declaratory action seeking to enjoin the city from entering into a contract with Waste Management, Inc., for the design, construction and operation of a solid waste disposal and resource recovery facility. The complaint alleged that in awarding the contract to Waste Management, Inc., the city had violated the competitive bidding requirements of its own municipal ordinance as well as the Consultants Competitive Negotiation Act, section 287.055, Florida Statutes (1981), and the Sunshine Law, section 286.011, Florida Statutes (1981). The city responded that because of the urgent need for the facility, it did not have time to follow the ordinary procedure of selecting an engineering firm, preparing design specifications and obtaining competitive bids. Therefore, it purported to rely upon an emergency provision of its ordinance to suspend the requirements of competitive bidding. The city argued that the procedure it followed in requiring the only two vendors interested in the job to submit their own specifications and in conducting simultaneous confidential negotiations with these vendors was calculated to obtain the best competitive offer in the shortest reasonable time. Waste Management Inc., was allowed to intervene as a party defendant. Thereafter, the court dismissed the suit on the premise that appellant did not have the requisite standing to bring the action.

Florida has a checkered history concerning the requirements for standing to bring a taxpayer's suit. Early decisions upheld the right of a taxpayer to sue to enjoin an illegal disposition of public funds. Anderson v. Fuller, 51 Fla. 380, 41 So. 684 (1906); Peck v. Spencer, 26 Fla. 23, 7 So. 642 (1890). The supreme court next dealt with the question of taxpayers' standing in Rickman v. Whitehurst, 73 Fla. 152, 74 So. 205 (1917). From this case evolved certain principles which some courts have referred to as the Rickman rule. In Rickman, the plaintiff was a taxpayer of DeSoto County and the owner of real estate situated within the Punta Gorda Special Road and Bridge District which was within the county. The legislative enactment which had established the district required all road and bridge construction work to be let by contract to the lowest bidder. The county commissioners and bond trustees used day labor for the road and bridge work, so the plaintiff sought to enjoin the unlawful disbursement of public funds. In the course of concluding that the suit was properly dismissed for lack of standing, the court stated:

The principle is universally recognized that to entitle a party to relief in equity he must bring his case under some acknowledged head of equity jurisdiction. In a case where a public official is about to commit an unlawful act, the public by its authorized public officers must institute the proceeding to prevent the wrongful act, unless a private person is threatened with or suffers some public or special damage to his individual interests, distinct from that of every other inhabitant, in which case he may maintain his bill.

73 Fla. at 158, 74 So. at 207.

Notwithstanding Rickman, the supreme court in several later cases permitted the maintenance of taxpayers' suits without requiring a showing that the plaintiff had suffered a special injury different from that of other taxpayers. Wester v. Belote, 103 Fla. 976, 138 So. 721 (1931); Robert G. Lassiter & Co. v. Taylor, 99 Fla. 819, 128 So. 14 (1930); Hathaway v. Munroe, 97 Fla. 28, 119 So. 149 (1929); cf. City of Daytona Beach v. News Journal Corp., 116 Fla. 706, 156 So. 887 (1934) (taxpayer was also a competitor). A number of district court of appeal decisions also authorized taxpayer suits without proof of special injury. Hunter v. Carmichael, 133 So.2d 584 (Fla. 2d DCA 1961); Ashe v. City of Boca Raton, 133 So.2d 122 (Fla. 2d DCA 1961); Robinson's, Inc. v. Short, 146 So.2d 108 (Fla. 1st DCA 1962); R.L. Bernardo & Sons, Inc. v. Duncan, 134 So.2d 297 (Fla. 1st DCA 1961); cf. Krantzler v. Board of County Commissioners, 354 So.2d 126 (Fla. 3d DCA 1978) (purporting to rely in part on Rickman for the proposition that no special injury need be shown).

The next turn of the wheel occurred in Department of Administration v. Horne, 269 So.2d 659 (Fla.1972), in which taxpayers attacked the constitutionality of various provisions of the general appropriations act. The Department of Administration asserted that the plaintiffs had no standing because they were challenging appropriations rather than expenditures. The court rejected this distinction by explaining that once an appropriation is made, an expenditure will follow administratively as a matter of course. The court then turned to an analysis of Rickman v. Whitehurst:

Essentially, the "Rickman Rule" requires a showing of special injury. We find, however, that the instant case presents a valid exception to the so-called "Rickman Rule." Appellees have alleged the unconstitutionality of certain sections of an appropriations act. These sections are said to be violative of constitutional provisions which place limitations upon enacting legislation regarding state funds. We hold that such allegation in this narrow area satisfies the requirement for "standing" to attack an appropriations act.

269 So.2d at 662 (footnote omitted). The court based its "exception" to the Rickman rule upon Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83, 88 S.Ct. 1942, 20 L.Ed.2d 947 (1968), in which the United States Supreme Court had recently held that federal taxpayers had standing to challenge the validity of a federal spending program upon constitutional grounds.

In 1979, the Third District Court of Appeal in Paul v. Blake, 376 So.2d 256 (Fla. 3d DCA 1979), relied upon Horne and Rickman to deny taxpayers' standing to challenge, except upon constitutional grounds, the granting of tax exemptions to certain leasehold interests in governmentally owned real property at the Miami International Airport. In referring to the Rickman rule, the court said:

This rule is based on the sound policy ground that without a special injury standing requirement, the courts would in all likelihood be faced with a great number of frivolous lawsuits filed by disgruntled taxpayers who, along with much of the taxpaying public these days, are not entirely pleased with certain of the taxing and spending decisions of their elective representatives. It is felt that absent some showing of special injury as thus defined, the taxpayer's remedy should be at the polls and not in the courts. Moreover, it has long been recognized that in a representative democracy the public's representatives in government should ordinarily be relied on to institute the appropriate legal proceedings to prevent the unlawful exercise of the state or county's taxing and spending power.

376 So.2d at 259. The court then noted the exception to the special injury standing requirement when the suit is premised on constitutional grounds and concluded by saying:

We recognize that all these standing rules are based on highly debatable policy choices, but they represent, in our view, a reasonable effort to guarantee that the state and counties lawfully exercise their taxing and spending authority without unduly hampering the normal operations of a representative democratic government. We adhere to these rules today because they are based on long-established precedent and seem both reasonable and fair.

376 So.2d at 259-60.

The supreme court once again addressed the subject in Department of Revenue v. Markham, 396 So.2d 1120 (Fla.1981), and held that one suing in the capacity of a citizen and taxpayer did not have standing to seek a determination of whether household goods of nonresidents were subject to taxation. The court reasoned:

The complaint for declaratory relief contained no allegation of any special injury, and it did not attack the constitutionality of the taxing statutes in question. It has long been the rule in Florida that, in the absence of a constitutional challenge, a taxpayer may bring suit only upon a showing of special injury which is distinct from that suffered by other taxpayers in the taxing district.

396 So.2d at 1121.

The appellant makes a plausible argument that the holding of Rickman v. Whitehurst has been misinterpreted. For example, the Rickman court may have only concluded that the taxpayer had no standing because there was no allegation that the cost of building the roads and bridges by day labor would exceed the cost of construction through competitive bidding; thus, there was no threat of increased taxation. At this point, however, it makes no difference that others might read Rickman in a different light. The supreme court has, in fact, unmistakably interpreted Rickman to mean that the plaintiff must show a special injury different from other taxpayers in order to have standing to bring a taxpayer's suit. The court obviously believed this to be the law when it decided Department of Administration v. Horne because otherwise there would have been no need to make an exception to the...