Turlock Irrigation District v. Williams

Foote, C. This is an application for a writ of mandate to compel the defendant, as the secretary of an irrigation district (under the “act to provide for the organization and government of irrigation districts,” etc., approved March 7, 1887, Sess. Laws, p. 29), to sign certain bonds which .the applicant proposes to issue under section 15 of that act.

The refusal of the defendant to sign those instruments is based upon the ground that the statute is unconstitutional and void.

One of the distinguished counsel for the defendant contends that the districts contemplated by the act are private corporations, formed for a private purpose; to use his own language: “ Such an organization has none of the elements of a public municipal body.”

While another able attorney on the same side contends that “all the constituents of a public corporation are present, and to that class of corporations a district [368]of the statute must be assigned,” and claims that the money sought to be raised under the act is a general tax, and that the system of organization of the corporations prescribed in the act is in conflict with the general plan of constitutional political organizations, and that the mode of taxation provided is different from that made necessary by the constitution for general governmental purposes, and therefore the act is void.

We are inclined to agree with the last-mentioned advocate of the defendant’s cause, but to the extent only that the districts, when organized as provided in the act under discussion, have all the elements of corporations formed to accomplish a public use and purpose, according to the rules of law laid down in Hagar v. Supervisors Yolo County, 47 Cal. 223; Dean v. Davis, 51 Cal. 406; People v. Williams, 56 Cal. 647; People v. La Rue, 67 Cal. 526; Reclamation District v. Hagar, 66 Cal. 54.

The results to be derived from a drainage law, and one which has for its purpose the irrigation of immense bodies of arid lands, must necessarily be the same, as respects the public good; the one is intended to bring into cultivation and make productive a large acreage of land which would otherwise remain uncultivated and unproductive of any advantage to the state, being useless, incapable of yielding any revenue of importance toward the support of the general purposes of state government, by reason of too much water flowing over, or standing upon, or percolating through, them.