Miller v. Kister

McKee, J. Application for a writ of mandate to compel the county auditor of Mono County to draw a warrant on the county treasury in favor of the petitioner for the sum of $250, which he claims to be due and owing to him by the county for his salary as county clerk of the county for the month of March, 1885.

The petitioner was elected at the general election in 1884. He qualified according to law, and entered on the discharge of his official duties on the first Monday in January, 1885. From that time until the 1st of April, 1885, he received compensation for his services at the rate of $250 per month, under the provisions of an act entitled “An act to establish a uniform system of county and township governments," approved 14th of March, 1883. (Stats. 1883, p. 299.)

By the provisions of that act Mono County, having a population of more than seven thousand and less than seven thousand five hundred, entered the class of counties known and designated as the thirty-fifth class; and the [143]compensation of the county clerk of the county was fixed at three thousand dollars per annum, payable monthly out of the county treasury, upon warrants to be drawn by the county auditor. (Secs. 162, 163, 169, pp. 334, 354, 363, Stats. 1883.)

But on the 1st of April, 1885, when the petitioner made demand of the auditor for his usual warrant for the month of March, the auditor refused him a warrant for any greater sum than $133-J, upon the ground that the legislature, by an act passed on the 18th of March, 1885, reduced salaries of county clerks of the thirty-fifth class to sixteen hundred dollars per annum.

The power of the legislature to regulate the compensation of all county and township officers in proportion to duties, and for that purpose to classify the counties oí the state by population, is unquestionable. In the exercise of that power the legislature, by the act of 1883, carried out the commands of the constitution upon those subjects; and the act has been adjudged by this court constitutional. (Longan v. Solano County, 65 Cal. 122.)

But on the 18th of March, 1885, the legislature, by several enactments, revised the act of 1883, by amending the one hundred and sixty-second section “ relating to the classification of counties,” and “by amending and revising and subdividing into new sections ” a number of the sections of the act, among which was section 163, relating to the compensation of county officers in counties of the thirty-fifth class, etc. (Stats. 1885, pp. 166, 194, 195.)