City of San Luis Obispo v. Pettit

Hayne, C. This was an action to recover delinquent taxes. The property taxed was a sum of money depos[500]ited with the defendant in his official capacity, under an order of the superior court, in a pending case. During the fiscal year 1887-88, the defendant reported the deposit to the assessor, who, however, did not assess it to him, but (probably acting under a mistaken view of the law) assessed it to the plaintiffs in the suit. The tax was not paid. In the following year the property was assessed to the defendant. But upon the theory that it had “ escaped assessment ” the preceding year, the amount of the assessment was doubled. The trial court gave judgment for the plaintiff, and the defendant appeals. The points made relate to the validity of the assessment.

1. In doubling the assessment, the assessor acted under a provision of the Political Code which is as follows:—

“Sec. 3649. Any property discovered by the assessor to have escaped assessment for the last preceding year, if such property is in the ownership or under the control of the same person who owned or controlled it for such preceding year, may be assessed at double its value.”

The validity of this provision was affirmed in Biddle v. Oaks, 59 Cal. 95, in which case the court said that the legislature had power to impose a penalty for neglect to have an assessment made. In the ease before us, there was no such neglect, because the defendant reported the property to the assessor. But we do not understand the decision as confining the operation or validity of the provision to cases where there has been neglect on the part of the person to whom the assessment is made. The terms of the provision indicate no such limitation. The language is general, and applies to all cases where property has escaped assessment in the preceding year, whatever may have been the cause of such escape.

Lfor do we think that upon this construction the provision is invalid. Its evident purpose is to carry out [501]the general intention pervading the revenue system, that all private property shall bear its share of the burden of taxation. This is certainly a legitimate purpose, and the means employed to carry it out are not, in our opinion, in violation of any constitutional provision. The section does not provide that the property shall not be assessed in proportion to its value. It provides, in effect, that in certain cases assessments for two different years may be made in one, and therefore goes, in effect, merely to the time at which an assessment may be made. We see no constitutional objection to this. It is true that in exceptional cases it might happen that the property would increase or decrease in value since the preceding assessment, and hence that merely doubling the assessment would not be an accurate way of arriving at the value for the preceding year. But in the great majority of cases, doubling the assessment would be a fair enough way of arriving at a valuation for the preceding year.