Jasper County Democrat, Volume 12, Number 64, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1909 — GRAVEL ROAD LAW INVALID. [ARTICLE]

GRAVEL ROAD LAW INVALID.

Supreme Court Holds It- Local and Special Act— All Work Stops and Bondholders May Lose. The supreme court has decided that the law for building gravel roads by taxation is unconstitutional. The decision is not limited to declaring the invalidity of the “threemile law,” but applies to all provisions of the amended highway act of 1905, which authorize free gravel roads to be paid for by taxation levied on all the property in the township, instead of assesments on the lands benefited. The court decides that this part of the law is invalid because it only authorizes gravel roads to be constructed by taxation on “a petition signed by fifty or more freeholders and voters of any township • • ♦ which includes any incorporated city or town * ♦ ♦ having a population of less than thirty thousand inhabitants.” This provision is held to make the law a local and special act. Judge Jordan said; “<These requirements of the law manifestly exclude, first, every township which does not have an incorporated town or city with a population of fewer than thirty thousand; second, every and all townships which have no incorporated town or city whatever. * * * Can it, with any color of reason, be claimed that townships, wherein there is an incorporated city of less than thirty thousand inhabitants, are in a class by themselves, so as to afford a reasonable basis for making a law applicable to improving highways applicable alone to them? * * * “Certainly such a classification is not a natural or reasonable one. It can not be said to inhere in the subject matter of laying out, establishing and improving public highways. • * •

“We conclude and so hold that Section 63 of the act in question (Section 7712, Burns, 1908) is unconstitutional and therefore void. Excepting Section 81, it may be said that all of the sections of the act which appear and follow under the caption, ‘Gravel roads by taxation,’ from Section 62 to 82 (Sections 7711-7733, Burns, 1909), inclusive, depend upon said Section 63 and are mutually connected and associated therewith that each and all must go down together.” On the foregoing opinion the supreme court reversed a judgment by which the board of commissioners of Hamilton county from letting contracts for the construction of more than 140,000 of gravel road improvements under that law, and to issue bonds in payment, which should, in turn, be paid by taxation.