Judges: Jim Smith, Attorney General Prepared by: Percy W. Mallison, Jr., Assistant Attorney General
Filed Date: 8/19/1980
Status: Precedential
Modified Date: 7/5/2016
Samuel T. Adams Callaway City Attorney Apalachicola
QESTIONS:
1. May a municipality legally expend public funds to institute and prosecute an action to test the legal sufficiency of allegations contained in a recall petition brought against an individual city commissioner pursuant to s.
2. If the answer to question 1 is in the negative, would a city commissioner whose recall petition was legally challenged with the use of public funds, and who voted to use public funds for that purpose, have a legal obligation to reimburse the municipality for the expenditures?
SUMMARY:
A municipality may not expend public funds to institute and prosecute a legal action to test the legal sufficiency of the allegations contained in a recall petition filed against one of the members of the city commission; and, when municipal funds are improperly and not in good faith expended for that purpose, any member of the governing body who voted to so expend the funds may be held personally liable for the expenditure.
AS TO QUESTION 1:
Municipal recall elections are provided for and governed by s.
Your first question concerns the legality of a municipality's expending public funds to institute and prosecute an action to test the legal sufficiency of the allegations contained in a recall petition. While the truth or falsity of the statements made to support recall is not a matter into which a court will inquire, that ascertainment being the province of the electors, the legal sufficiency of the facts alleged as constituting one of the specific statutory grounds for recall is subject to judicial scrutiny. See Bent, supra, and Wolfson, supra; see also AGO 075-119 and the cases cited therein. Clearly, a municipal officer has a sufficient property right in his office to permit him in his individual capacity to challenge the sufficiency of the underlying petition. See DuBose v. Kelly,
You have advanced another justification for a municipality's expending public funds to challenge the legal sufficiency of a recall petition which is unrelated to the outcome of the election. You have hypothesized a situation is which no one chalenges the sufficiency of the petition until after the recall election has been held. You argue that, if the petition's sufficiency is successfully challenged after the election has been held and the election results are therefore invalidated, the municipality will have expended considerable funds for an election which otherwise might have been avoided by the filing of a timely legal challenge. In order to avoid such a scenario in which municipal funds are needlessly expended for an election which is later in validated, you wish to know whether the municipality itself might be justified in challenging the legal sufficiency of the recall petition prior to the holding of the election.
You have indicated in your inquiry that the city would seek declaratory and injunctive relief. Whether a court would even entertain such a suit is doubtful. In this regard it has been held that declaratory judgment procedures may not be invoked to obtain legal advice from the court. See State v. Lewis,
Whether a justification such as the one you have advanced could be considered sufficient to constitute a public purpose has never been determined, to my knowledge, by a court of law. Neither am I aware of any cases in which the results of a recall election have been set aside at the insistence of a recalled public official on the grounds that the underlying petition was insufficient when such challenge was not made until after the election. In the absence of such a court determination, and in view of the extremely speculative nature of the injury hypothesized by you, I have no power to declare such a use of public funds to be for a valid public purpose; and I cannot countenance their use in such a fashion.
AS TO QUESTION 2:
Your second question is whether a city commissioner whose recall petition was successfully challenged through the use of public funds would be under any legal obligation to reimburse the city for those expenditures. The general rule with respect to the expenditure of public funds is that any official who authorizes an improper expenditure of public funds is personally liable therefor. 26 Fla. Jur. Public Officers s. 128, pp. 264-266; 67 C.J.S. Officers s. 212, pp. 693-694; and White v. Crandon,
Prepared by: Percy W. Mallison, Jr., Assistant Attorney General
Williams v. Howard , 329 So. 2d 277 ( 1976 )
State v. City of Miami , 379 So. 2d 651 ( 1980 )
Bent v. Ballantyne , 368 So. 2d 351 ( 1979 )
Bryant v. Gray , 70 So. 2d 581 ( 1954 )
Anderson v. Dimick , 77 So. 2d 867 ( 1955 )
Williams v. City of Miami , 42 So. 2d 582 ( 1949 )
Wolfson v. Work , 326 So. 2d 90 ( 1976 )
Markham v. State, Dept. of Revenue , 298 So. 2d 210 ( 1974 )
Okaloosa Island L. Ass'n, Inc. v. Okaloosa Island Auth. , 308 So. 2d 120 ( 1975 )