Petition of Public Service Co.

• Decision Date: 05 November 1951
• Citation: 84 A.2d 177,97 N.H. 549
• Parties: Petition of PUBLIC SERVICE CO.
• Court: New Hampshire Supreme Court

Page 177

84 A.2d 177

97 N.H. 549

Petition of PUBLIC SERVICE CO.

Supreme Court of New Hampshire.

Nov. 5, 1951.

Franklin Hollis, Concord, for Public Service Co.

Gordon M. Tiffany, Atty. Gen., and John N. Nassikas, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the State.

Eugene S. Daniell, Jr., Sol., Franklin, for City of Franklin, opposed.

Robert P. Bingham, Manchester, for Office of Price Stabilization for the District of New Hampshire, opposed.

BLANDIN, Justice.

All parties agree that the question before us is whether, assuming for the purposes of this proceeding only that the allegations of the petition are true, the Public Utilities Commission may find upon them and the accompanying exhibits that an emergency exists under our laws. We believe that such a finding may be made, but we wish it to be clearly understood that nothing in this opinion is to be taken as any indication that the Commission should or should not find that an emergency exists. That is for them to say, with or without a hearing, as they see fit.

It appears our first task is to decide the meaning of 'emergency' as used in R.L. c. 292, § 9, as inserted by § 46, c. 203, Laws of 1951, which reads as follows: '9. Emergency. Whenever the commission shall be of the opinion that an emergency exists it may authorize any public utility temporarily to alter, amend or suspend any existing rate, fare, charge, price, classification or rule or regulation relating thereto.'

Presumably, the legislature meant the word to have its common meaning, R.L. c. 7, § 2, which is synonymous with crisis. Roget's Thesaurus, Int. Ed., § 704, p. 298. The 'Temporary Rates' section of the same chapter, § 27, with its provisions for notice, hearing and a reckoning of rates on a prescribed basis is obviously a time consuming procedure. For this reason we believe the legislature in § 9 above gave the Commission broad emergency powers. There is not the slightest suggestion in the wording of this section that the Commission's discretion was to be qualified or restricted except within the bounds of reason. Nor is there anything to indicate that the legislature had in mind any extraordinary or unusual meaning for the word, and we see no occasion for reading such into the statute. Obviously, emergency cannot be defined with absolute precision; latitude must be allowed for reasonable differences of opinion. We believe that the legislature, in accordance with the general policy which runs throughout our law, intended by § 9 to vest in the Commission as a fact finding body wide discretionary powers to decide whether a crisis was of sufficient severity to warrant relief and if so the extent of the relief. This construction of the statute permits those most intimately acquainted with the facts to pass judgment on a question which is essentially one of fact, rather than in effect leaving it for the law court to decide.

There is nothing in our decisions, or by the weight of authority elsewhere, 29 C.J.S., Emergency, pp. 760-762, to support the claim that the crisis must necessarily be unforeseen, or sudden, or unexpected, although actually here operations have unexpectedly failed to yield the company the rate of return to which the order of the Commission held it was entitled. On the contrary, in the case of New England Tel. & Tel. v. State, 95 N.H. 58, 57 A.2d 267, where an emergency was held to exist the approach of the difficulty had been foreseen for some time. There the court said that whether there was an emergency depended on the 'immediate needs of the company * * *.' 95 N.H. at page 62, 57 A.2d at page 270. Similarly, we believe the urgency of this petitioner's needs and not the time nor manner of their arrival is decisive. This it appears is the rationale of the Telephone opinion and any statements therein which might be read as qualifying or denying this principle apply only to the facts of that case and are not controlling here. Cf. also New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. Department of Public Utilities, 327 Mass. 81, 97 N.E.2d 509, reported in Public Utilities Fortnightly, Vol....