People ex rel. Egan v. City of Chicago

• Decision Date: 08 February 1924
• Docket Number: No. 15673.,15673.
• Citation: 310 Ill. 534,142 N.E. 161
• Parties: PEOPLE ex rel. EGAN, Bailiff, v. CITY OF CHICAGO et al.
• Court: Illinois Supreme Court

310 Ill. 534

142 N.E. 161

PEOPLE ex rel. EGAN, Bailiff,

v.CITY OF CHICAGO et al.

No. 15673.

Supreme Court of Illinois.

Dec. 19, 1923.

Rehearing Denied Feb. 8, 1924.

Petition for mandamus by the People, on the relation of Dennis J. Egan, Bailiff, against the City of Chicago and others. Judgment for relator, and defendants appeal.

Reversed.

Appeal from Superior Court, Cook County; Joseph B. David, judge.

Francis X. Busch, of Chicago (Leon Hornstein and Ruth C. Nelson, both of Chicago, of counsel), for appellants.

John F. Power, of Chicago, for appellee.

DUNN, J.

The superior court of Cook county overruled a demurrer of the city of Chicago and its mayor and aldermen to a petition praying for a writ of mandamus requiring them to pass an additional appropriation ordinance for the payment of the salaries of 24 deputy bailiffs of the municipal court of Chicago, and upon their election to stand by their demurrer it entered a judgment awarding the writ, from which they appealed.

The municipal court of Chicago, now consisting of 36 judges elected in the city of Chicago, was created by an act of the Legislature in 1905 (Laws 1905, p. 157) under the authority of section 1 of article 6 of the Constitution and the amendment proclaimed adopted on December 5, 1904, and known as section 34 of article 4. The act creating the court created the office of bailiff, and section 17 provided that the bailiff should appoint deputies of such number and at such salaries as might be fixed from time to time by orders signed by a majority of the judges and spread upon the records of the court, the salaries to be payable out of the city treasury in monthly installments, provided the salary of the chief deputy bailiffs should not exceed $2,500 per annum, and the salary of no other deputy bailiff should exceed $1,500 per annum. This act was submitted to a vote of the people, and was consented to by a majority of the voters at the general election held in November, 1905, in accordance with the requirement of section 34 of article 4. Section 17 was amended in 1907 so as to provide that the salary of the chief deputy bailiff should be $4,000 per annum and the salary of the assistant chief deputy bailiff should be $2,500 per annum, but leaving the provision in regard to the salaries of other deputy bailiffs unchanged. Laws of 1907, p. 225. This amendment was also submitted to a vote of the people, and was consented to by a majority of the voters. An act for further amending this section by raising the maximum for the salaries of deputy bailiffs other than the chief deputy and assistant chief deputy to $2,000 was passed by the Legislature in 1919, but no provision was made for submitting it to a vote of the people, and therefore it did not become effective. Laws of 1919, p. 409. On March 2, 1923, an order signed by a majority of the judges of the municipal court was spread upon the records of the court authorizing the bailiff to appoint a chief deputy bailiff at a salary of $4,000, an assistant chief deputy bailiff at a salary of $3,000, and 212 deputy, bailiffs at various salaries ranging from $1,650 to $2,000. The city council was notified of this order and requested to make an appropriation of the amounts mentioned, but the appropriation ordinance passed contained appropriations for the salaries of the chief deputy bailiff, the assistant chief deputy bailiff, and only 191 deputy bailiffs, instead of 212. The petition set forth these facts and prayed for a writ of mandamus requiring the council to make appropriations for the salaries of the omitted deputy bailiffs.

The objections which are made to the petition are that section 17 violates sections 9 and 10 of article 9 of the Constitution, because it imposes obligations and taxes for local purposes by other than the corporate authorities upon the people of the city; that it violates section 13 of article 4 because it amends various provisions of the Cities and Villages Act (Smith-Hurd Rev. St. 1923, c. 24) in relation to the fixing of salaries and the number of employees of the city without setting out the sections amended; and that the amendment of 1919 is unconstitutional because not submitted to a referendum.

Sections 9 and 10 of article 9 provide that the General Assembly may vest the corporate authorities of cities, towns, and villages with authority to assess and collect taxes for corporate purposes, but shall not itself impose taxes upon municipal corporations, or the inhabitants or property thereof, for corporate purposes. Similar provisions in section 5 of article 9 of the Constitution of 1848 were held to be a prohibition to the Legislature from granting the power to assess and collect taxes to any other than the corporate authorities of the municipality to be taxed or from compelling a municipality to incur a debt without its consent. People v. Mayor of Chicago, 51 Ill. 17, 2 Am. Rep. 278;People v. Salomon, 51 Ill. 37;Harward v. St. Clair & Monroe Drainage Co., 51 Ill. 130. Since the adoption of the Constitution of 1870, sections 9 and 10 of article 9 have received the same construction, and have always been held to prohibit the Legislature from imposing taxes on the people of any district or granting power to do so to any other than corporate authorities of the district to be taxed, and the corporate authorities intended are such as have been elected directly by the people of the district or appointed in some mode to which they have given their consent. Updike v. Wright, 81 Ill. 49;Dunham v. People, 96 Ill. 331;Cornell v. People, 107 Ill. 372;Wetherell v. Devine, 116 Ill. 631, 6 N. E. 24;Herschbach v. Kaskaskia Island Sanitary District, 265 Ill. 388, 106 N. E. 942.

[1] The appellants contend that the judges of the municipal court fix the number of deputies and the amount of their salaries, and by that act impose upon the city an obligation which can only be removed by taxation, but that they are not corporate authorities, and the city cannot be compelled to meet by taxation the debt thus sought to be forced upon it. Corporate authorities have been defined in the decision of this court as those officers who are either directly elected by the population to be taxed or are appointed in some mode to which the people have given their consent. Harward v. St. Clair & Monroe Drainage Co., supra; Cornell v. People, supra; Wetherell v. Devine, supra. The Municipal Court Act was adopted by a vote of the people of the city of Chicago. By this action they consented to the manner in which the number and salaries of the deputy bailiffs were to be fixed, and the judges to whom was committed that power became for that purpose the corporate authorities contemplated by the sections of the Constitution cited. It was said in People v. Salomon, supra:

‘There is no prohibition which we have been able to discover, and we have been pointed to none, against the creation by the Legislature, of every conceivable description of corporate authority, and when created to endow them with all the faculties and attributes of other pre-existing corporate authorities. Thus, for example, there is nothing in the Constitution of this state, to prevent the Legislature from placing the police department of Chicago, or its fire department, or its waterworks, under the control of an authority which may be constituted for such purpose by a vote of the people, and endow it with power to assess and collect taxes for their support, and confide to it their control and government. Section 5 of article 9, would not be violated thereby, because the authority thus established, would be a corporate authority, and the purposes for which taxes could be assessed, are, undeniably, corporate.’

The judges of the municipal court have by the consent of the people become corporate authorities, not with power to assess and collect taxes, but with control, so far as the law has confided it to them, of the expenses of the court and with power to incur indebtedness on the part of the city for that purpose, for which it is the duty of the city council to provide by the appropriation of money to pay it and the levy of taxes for that purpose.

The case of People v. Salomon, supra, involved the extension of the taxes of the South Park Commissioners, while People v. Mayor of Chicago, supra, involved the issue of bonds of the city of Chicago on the demand of the commissioners of Lincoln Park, and the two cases illustrate the application of the principle now under consideration; for as was said in the former case, the Legislature undertook in the Lincoln Park Case to compel the people of Chicago to incur a debt without either their own consent or that of their corporate authorities, for it was impossible to hold that the commissioners of that park were corporate authorities of the city of Chicago; while in the South Park Case the people of the towns, of South Chicago, Hyde Park, and Lake, by voting for the law, made the commissioners corporate aurhorities of the towns and empowered them to assess the requisite tax upon the property of the towns. The tax was really self-imposed by agents not directly named by the people, but by the Governor, by virtue of authority conferred by...