City of Thibodaux v. Louisiana Power & Light Company
Opinion
J. SKELLY WRIGHT, District Judge.
The City of Thibodaux, operator of a municipally-owned electric utility plant, seeks.in these proceedings 1 to condemn facilities owned and operated by the Lorn isiana Power & Light Company in that section of the city recently acquired by extension of the city’s limits. Act 111 of 1900 2 is suggested as containing the authority .of the city to condemn these facilities.
. In 1900, when Act 111 was passed by the Louisiana Legislature, the operations of utilities serving the cities of the State of Louisiana were usually com fined to the territorial limits of the municipalities. In other words, there was a power plant in the city .with suffL cient conduits and lines emanating therefrom to service the homes and the industry in the area. Act 111 provides that such a plant, with its service accessories, when owned by private utility, may be condemned by the city for the operation of a public utility.
The defendant, Louisiana Power & Light Company, operates a private electric utility system servicing a large part of the state of Louisiana. Electric em ergy .sufficient to service .this large area is obtained from two plants operated by the defendant, its Sterlington plant near *517 -Monroe, Louisiana, and its plant at Nine Mile Point near New Orleans, Louisiana. The defendant operates in various parishes and municipalities through franchises obtained from those-bodies. It holds a franchise from the Parish of Lafourche covering the area in suit, the area now part of the City of Thibodaux by reason of the recent extension of the city’s limits. The question presented by this litigation is whether the City, under Act 111 of 1900, may condemn, not the plant or plants with their accessories operated by the defendant utility, but whether the City may condemn only that portion of the defendant’s system, the poles, the lines, etc., which service the newly annexed section of Thibodaux.
Although the power of eminent domain inheres in the United States and several states as an incident to their sovereignty, 3 the grant of that power by these sovereigns to one of their subdivisions will never pass by implication, for the power of eminent domain is one of the attributes of sovereignty most fraught with the possibility of abuse and injustice. 4 When the power is granted by the state to one of its subdivisions, the extent to which it may be exercised is limited to the express terms or clear implication of the statute in which the grant is contained. 5 A federal court, therefore, before recognizing the exercise of power of eminent domain by a subdivision of a state under a state statute, must make certain that that power has been granted by the state to the subdivision in the form of its attempted exercise.
There are no state court decisions to guide this court in the resolution of this problem. In fact, it does not appear that any court at any time has ever interpreted Act 111 of 1900. The Attorney General of the State of Louisiana, in an opinion rendered October 10, 1951, in a situation identical to the one in suit, advises that a city may not expropriate a part of a utility system, in an area recently acquired by extension of the city limits, for the purpose of adding those facilities to the presently existing municipally operated utility. While the opinion of the Attorney General, of course, is not binding on this court under Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 58 S.Ct. 817, 82 L.Ed. 1188 nevertheless coming from the chief legal officer of the state whose statute is to be interpreted, it gives this court pause. It points up the fact that no authoritative interpretation of the statute has ever been made by a Louisiana court. And before a federal court, under its diversity of citizenship jurisdiction, ventures into the field of expropriation under authority of a heretofore uninterpreted Louisiana statute, the need of guidance from the Supreme Court of Louisiana becomes clear.
Under these circumstances, the only way this .court can determine with certainty whether the power sought to be exercised here exists in the City of Thibodaux is to have a decision of the Supreme Court of Louisiana so holding. An interpretation of the expropriation statute in suit may be obtained through the Louisiana Declaratory Judgment procedure 6 and this court may act with assurance in these proceedings after such interpretation is obtained. 7 Further *518 proceedings herein, therefore, will be stayed until the Supreme Court of Louisiana has been afforded an opportunity to interpret Act 111 of 1900.
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153 F. Supp. 515 (City of Thibodaux v. Louisiana Power & Light Company) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.