A. F. Anderson Estate, Inc. v. Payne

CRAIL, P. J.

This case was transferred to us by the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs petitioned the superior court

[531]

for a writ of mandate to compel the modification of the assessor’s 1933 assessments of certain property in the county of Los Angeles and to have lower valuations substituted therefor. The county auditor and county tax collector were made defendants, and the prayer of the petition was that they be directed to enter valuations different from those certified to them by the board of equalization. A full and complete transcript of the hearings before the board of equalization containing 652 pages was made a part of the plaintiffs’ petition for a writ. It is the plaintiffs’ claim that the action of the board of equalization in denying their applications when presented to that body amounted to constructive fraud and therefore it would become the duty of the tax collector, as soon as such should be determined to be the case by the court, to act in accordance with the

legal

effect of the evidence before the board of review.

The appeal is from a judgment of the superior court entered against the plaintiffs upon an order sustaining a demurrer without leave to amend. It is the contention of the plaintiffs that the questions of fact presented to the board of equalization are undisputed, that the evidence is uncontradicted and subject to only one reasonable interpretation, which interpretation they contend is favorable to plaintiffs. By reason of the peculiar turn which the petition took, arising out of the fact that all the evidence which was taken at the hearings of the board of equalization was made a part of the petition, we have the anomalous situation before us of reviewing the legal effect of a mass of evidence in order to determine the correctness of a ruling upon demurrer.

The same situation arose in the case of

Rittersbacher

v.

Board of Supervisors,

220 Cal. 535 [32 Pac. (2d) 135], which case was almost on all fours with the case herein. The chief difference between that ease and this is that whereas we have the full testimony of the county assessor in this case as a part of the petition, in that ease the court had before it all the testimony of plaintiffs’ witnesses but only a written report of the county assessor. This is a distinction without a difference, except that the testimony of the assessor in the instant case is probably more contradictory to plaintiffs’ contentions. In any event it contains substantial contradictions thereto. In that case the court said: “On the appeal from