Hopkins v. Fields

154 S.W.2d 22, 202 Ark. 890, 1941 Ark. LEXIS 267
CourtSupreme Court of Arkansas
DecidedJuly 7, 1941
Docket4-6429
StatusPublished
Cited by5 cases

This text of 154 S.W.2d 22 (Hopkins v. Fields) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Arkansas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Hopkins v. Fields, 154 S.W.2d 22, 202 Ark. 890, 1941 Ark. LEXIS 267 (Ark. 1941).

Opinion

Smith, J.

The Sebastian Bridge District was organized under act 104 of the Acts of 1913, p. 380. Appellant owned lot 18, block 2, Fishback Addition No. 2 to the city of Fort Smith, which lot was subject to the taxes levied by the bridg-e district. She failed to pay taxes due the district, and by appropriate foreclosure proceedings the lot was sold to the district, which, on September 17,1940, conveyed the lot to appellees for the consideration of $11.22, this being the total amount of the tax, penalty, interest and costs due on the lot.

Appellant filed a pleading which she called an intervention in the foreclosure suit on February 14, 1941, in which she tendered the full amount-of the tax, etc., for which the lot sold, and prayed that she be allowed to redeem her lot. This relief was denied her, and from that decree is this appeal.

The sale is first attacked upon the authority of the case of Haglin v. Hunt, 187 Ark. 480, 60 S. W. 2d 561. There, two lots were assessed and sold in solido to an individual for the taxes due the Sebastian Bridge District. The.sale was set aside by the court below — and that decree was affirmed by this court — it being held that the sale was not made in the manner required by law. We held that the commissioner making the sale should have offered, first, one lot, and then the other, to ascertain if any one would pay the taxes on both lots for one or the other of them, and that both lots should not have been sold unless it appeared that no one would bid the taxes, etc., for less than the whole amount against both lots. Here, however, only one lot was sold, and the sale was to the district, as authorized by act 104 of 1913, because no one bid the amount of the taxes, etc., due on the lot. It is not to be assumed that if no one would pay the taxes, etc., for the whole of the lot, some one might have paid the taxes, etc., for a fractional part of it.

Section 29 of the act provides: “The property shall be offered to the person who will' pay the assessment, penalty and costs for the least amount of said land; and, if none should offer the amount of the assessment, penalty and costs then the delinquent land shall be stricken off to the bridge district and a deed shall be made to it in like manner as to an individual purchaser. And it shall be lawful for said district to hold such land until such time as it may be sold advantageously, in the judgment of the commission. ’ ’

The authority for selling to the district arose'out of the failure of any individual to buy the lot at the sale, and as no one offered to buy the lot “the delinquent land” was stricken off to the bridge district. In that event, the delinquent land or lot, and not some fractional part of it, is stricken off to the district, and that was done here, so that the Haglin case, sufra, has no application.

The lot was sold September 11, 1939, and the intervention ' (which, in effect, is an application to redeem) was filed February 14, 1941, so that more than one year had elapsed between the date of the sale and the date of the offer to redeem, and it was held that the offer to redeem had not been made within the time allowed by act 104, under the provisions of which the lot had been sold, and the intervention was dismissed as being without equity.

Section 32 of act 104 provides that ‘ ‘ The owner may redeem from the purchaser at any time within one year after the sale, by paying him the amount paid by him with twenty per cent, thereon, which redemption shall be noted upon the margin of the decree by the purchaser.”

The insistence is — and the finding by the court below was — that the right of redemption must have been exercised within the time allowed by the act under the provisions of which the lot was sold, and that the provision in regard to redemption is unaffected and unchanged by later legislation.

Appellant asserts the right to redeem under any one of several sections of the Digest, § 7331, Pope’s Digest, among others. This section was enacted as act 252 of the Acts of 1933, p. 790; but ive do not think it applicable to this case, for the reason that its provisions are limited to municipal improvement districts, and the Sebastian Bridge District is not a municipal improvement district. Municipal improvement districts are those districts organized by the governing agency of the city or town or municipality in which they are located and of which they are a part, or the whole thereof, such as streets, sewers, waterworks, etc. Districts which include and impose taxes upon lands, both rural and urban, are not municipal improvement districts. These are road, bridge, levee, drainage, fencing, etc., districts. Butler v. Board Directors Fourche Drainage District, 99 Ark. 100, 137 S. W. 251. The Sebastian Bridge District includes, not only the entire city of Fort Smith, but includes also the whole of the Fort Smith District of Sebastian county, and is not, therefore, a, municipal improvement district, and the provisions of § 7331, Pope’s Digest, are inapplicable for that reason. Moreover, § 7331, Pope’s Digest, is identical with and was enacted as act 252 of the Acts of 1933, to which act further reference will be made.

The right of redemption is asserted also under the provisions of § 5644, Crawford & Moses’ Digest.

This section was a part of act 43 of the Acts of 1915, p. 123, entitled, “An Act to regulate sales by Commissioners in Chancery for special assessments and redemptions therefrom.” The act consists of a single section, yet it was broken into and appears as three sections in Crawford & Moses’ Digest, to-wit: Sections 5642, 5643 and 5644. Of these several sections, §§ 5642 and 5643 are carried forward in Pope’s Digest, where they appear as §§ 7329 and 7330, respectively. Section 5644, Crawford & Moses’ Digest, is omitted from and does not appear in Pope’s Digest.

The Digester has this note appearing between §§ 7329 • and 7330, Pope’s Digest: “This act was repealed by act 129 of 1933, but the repealing act was held void by the Supreme Court of the United States in W. B. Worthen Co. v. Kavanaugh, 295 U. S. 56, 55 S. Ct. 555, 79 L. Ed. 1298, 97 A. L. R. 905, in a suit involving bonds issued before its passage, reversing W. B. Worthen Co. v. Delinquent Lands, 189 Ark. 723, 75 S. W. 2d 62. See, also, Arkansas Mortgage & Securities Co. v. Street Improvement District, 191 Ark. 487, 86 S. W. 2d 917.”

Act 129 of the Acts of 1933, p. 375, is entitled, “An Act to repeal § 5642 of Crawford and Moses’ Digest.” This act, in its entirety, exclusive of the emergency clause, reads as follows: “Section 1. Section 5642 of Crawford & Moses’ Digest is hereby repealed.”

This repealing act, No. 129, along with acts 252 and 278, passed at the same session of the General Assembly, was invalidated by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Worthen case, supra.

With the holding of that court in that case that acts 129, 252 and 278 of 1933 were invalid in their application to existing contracts, there remained some inquiry whether those acts were totally invalid, or could be separated in their applications to situations not affected by the contract clause of the national constitution.

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Related

Pinkert v. Lamb
224 S.W.2d 15 (Supreme Court of Arkansas, 1949)
Schuman v. Cherry
220 S.W.2d 817 (Supreme Court of Arkansas, 1949)
Fields v. Jarnagin
199 S.W.2d 961 (Supreme Court of Arkansas, 1947)
Ferguson v. Fields
188 S.W.2d 302 (Supreme Court of Arkansas, 1945)
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174 S.W.2d 439 (Supreme Court of Arkansas, 1943)

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Bluebook (online)
154 S.W.2d 22, 202 Ark. 890, 1941 Ark. LEXIS 267, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/hopkins-v-fields-ark-1941.