O. T. Johnson Corp. v. County of Los Angeles

DOOLING, J.,

pro

tem.

This is an appeal from a judgment in favor of defendant, County of Los Angeles. Plaintiffs and appellants are land owners and taxpayers owning lands within the limits of Acquisition and Improvement District No. 28 of the County of Los Angeles. This district was created uhder the provisions of the Acquisition and Improvement Act of 1925 (Stats. 1925, p. 849) for the purpose of acquiring certain lands for park purposes to be known as Alondra Park. In the proceedings looking to the acquisition of these lands the board of supervisors, under the authority of section 5 of the statute, divided the property to be assessed into two zones, designated respectively zone A and zone B, and determined that zone A should bear twenty-six per cent of the costs and zone B seventy-four per cent thereof. Appellants’ property lies in zone B and appellants paid the district tax levied upon their property for the fiscal year 1928-29 under protest and in this action seek to recover it back from the county.

Section 5 of the statute authorizes the land within the assessment district to be divided into zones according to benefits and provides that “each zone shall be composed of and include all the lands within the district which will be benefited in like measure”. It further provides that the

[442]

“legislative body shall also determine the percentage of the sum to be raised each year by the levy and collection of said special assessment taxes in said district for the payments on the principal and interest of the bonds, which will be raised from the lands in each zone”. In other sections of the statute it is provided that the bonds of the district shall be a general lien upon all the real property within the district and that the amounts necessary to make principal and interest payments on such bonds shall be raised annually by an

ad valorem

tax on such lands.

Appellants point out that in zone B the special assessment taxes on their various parcels of land range from $2.70 per acre to $15 per acre and they claim that such disproportionate levies upon lands within the same zone demonstrate that the board of supervisors in creating zone B did not follow the mandate of the statute that each zone should be composed of lands which will be benefited “in like measure”. The word “measure”, according to Webster’s dictionary, means “a quantity determined by a fixed standard”, and the phrase “benefited in like measure” may be taken to mean that the amount of benefits to the lands within the particular zone shall all be such as are determined by the same standard of computation. Since the statute itself provides for the levy of an