Palmer v. State ex rel. Axleroad

• Decision Date: 27 February 1942
• Parties: PALMER, Executive Chairman of Everglades National Park Commission, v. STATE ex rel. AXLEROAD.
• Court: Florida Supreme Court

6 So.2d 550

149 Fla. 616

PALMER, Executive Chairman of Everglades National Park Commission, v. STATE ex rel. AXLEROAD.

Florida Supreme Court

February 27, 1942

Appeal from Circuit Court, Dade County; Worth W Trammell, judge.

J. Tom Watson, Atty. Gen., Lewis W. Petteway, Asst. Atty. Gen., and Tiffany Turnbull, Sp. Asst. Atty. Gen., for appellant.

W. H Burwell, of Miami, for appellee.

THOMAS, Justice.

Upon consideration of the testimony introduced upon the alternative writ of mandamus and the answer of respondent a peremptory writ issued commanding the approval of salary warrants to relator for more than six thousand dollars in payment for his services as executive secretary of Everglades National Park Commission for the period from November 15, 1937 to August 4 1940. The trial judge specifically found that the 'relator did not voluntarily resign or relinquish his office as executive secretary' and that during the above period he 'was the executive secretary of the commission.'

The appellant challenges the status of relator as an officer and insists that he was an employee who was not entitled to compensation from the time he left the employment and ceased to perform any services. When the matter of the relator's compensation was considered by this court in State ex rel. Axleroad v. Lee, Comptroller, 132 Fla. 512, 181 So 9, it was clearly stated that his status as an employee or office holder was immaterial in that controversy. It now appears important to decide the point.

He was designated executive secretary of the park commission August 4, 1936, and was compensated for his work until November 15, 1937. His claim for remuneration from the latter date to August 4, 1940, is founded on the position that he was an officer and that, no term having been specified in the act, Chapter 16996, Laws of Florida, Acts of 1935, under which he was appointed, his tenure expired four years later because of the ruling in Landis et al. v. Green et al., 107 Fla. 335, 144 So. 681. The assertion is only as sound as the premise and we will, therefore, for the time devote our attention to the latter.

It is not simple to define precisely employee and officer or to distinguish between them. The task is not made easier in the instant case by the opinion in State ex rel. Coe v. Lee, Fla. 3 So.2d 497, dealing with the executive-chairmanship, which decision counsel for relator insists is determinative of the present controversy. It is true that certain features of the places named in the act 'Executive-Chairman' and 'Executive-Secretary' are the same but they are not identical in origin or in the authority to be exercised by the incumbents. The holder of the former post must be selected from the commission which is itself given extensive powers as may be seen by reading the act. One who serves in the latter need not be selected from the commission and from a study of the law we are impressed by the obscurity of his duties. See Article III, Section 27 of the Constitution.

Mr. Justice Whitfield wrote in State ex rel. Holloway v. Sheats, 78 Fla. 583, 83 So. 508, 509, that 'the term 'office' embraces the idea of tenure, duration, and duties in exercising some portion of the sovereign power, conferred or defined by law * * *' and that 'employment does not authorize the exercise in one's own right of any sovereign power or any prescribed independent authority of a governmental nature * * *.' We find nothing in the act that expressly shows any authorization of the exercise by the executive secretary of any portion of the sovereign powers nor have we discovered language from which duties so important could be deduced.

As we have pointed out no definite term of office, or as Mr. Justice Whitfield terms it, tenure is fixed in the act. This omission in itself would not, in view of the ruling in Landis et al v. Green, et al. supra, stamp the position as an...