Reading City v. Miller

45 Pa. Super. 28, 1910 Pa. Super. LEXIS 238
CourtSuperior Court of Pennsylvania
DecidedDecember 12, 1910
DocketAppeal, No. 215
StatusPublished
Cited by1 cases

This text of 45 Pa. Super. 28 (Reading City v. Miller) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Superior Court of Pennsylvania primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Reading City v. Miller, 45 Pa. Super. 28, 1910 Pa. Super. LEXIS 238 (Pa. Ct. App. 1910).

Opinion

Endlich, P. J.,

filed the following opinion:

An ordinance of the city of Reading approved February 4, 1909, and entitled “An Ordinance to secure the wholesomeness and purity of milk, meat and meat products, by authorizing the inspection thereof, by providing for the licensing of persons dealing therein, by prohibiting the sale or offering for sale of milk, meat and meat food products which are impure, unwholesome or adulterated, or otherwise unfit for human consumption, by providing penalties for the enforcement of the same,” directs the appointment and qualification of a “Milk and Meat Inspector,”—defines his duties, including the visitation of places in the city and within twenty miles of its limits of persons licensed to sell milk or meat therein, its analysis, etc.,—provides for the annual licensing of such vendors after due inspection of their premises and upon payment to the city of $10.00 and presentation of the receipt therefor to the inspector,—prohibits the sale of milk or meat within the city by persons not so licensed, whether from a wagon or from a store or stand,—and imposes penalties for violation of its mandates or prohibitions ranging from not less than $10.00 not more than $25.00 for first, to not less than $50.00 nor more than $100 for repeated offenses. A milk and meat inspector was duly appointed and qualified in accordance with the ordinance. Without applying to him for or securing the license provided for, or paying the prescribed fee, the defendant engaged in the business of selling milk at a store in the city of Reading. In a suit [30]*30brought against him in pursuance of the ordinance before an alderman, he was duly found to have violated the same, and judgment was entered against him for a penalty of $25.00 and costs. Thereupon he took out this writ of certiorari. The exceptions filed to the record returned by the alderman are (1) that the ordinance of February 4, 1909, is void as containing more than one subject; (2) that the city has no authority to enforce its provisions in relation to milk; (3) that the inspector appointed under it has no legal authority thereunder in relation to its milk provisions; (4) that the ordinance in this respect is an invasion of the powers of the board of health of the city as constituted by the Act of April 22, 1873, P. L. 831; (5) and (6) that it does not appear that defendant’s premises had been inspected before institution of the suit, and that therefore the same was premature.

The last-mentioned exceptions may be disposed of with the remark that there is nothing in the ordinance which calls for an inspection as a condition precedent to the duty to apply for or obtain a license to sell milk, or to the maintenance of proceedings for selling without such: a circumstance apparently recognized by defendant’s counsel in not adverting to these grounds of objection in either his oral argument or his brief in support of the certiorari.

1. The objection of multiplicity of subjects cannot be sustained. Of course it might have been practicable, though obviously inconvenient, to deal with the matter of inspection and sale of milk separately from that of the inspection, etc., of meat, by separate ordinances. Yet upon any save the narrowest view both are but divisions of the same subject,—the inspection, etc., of animal food products. Their treatment together, as parts of a single subject-matter, in an ordinance creating an office intended to deal with both for the same purpose and by substantially the same methods and with the same result, is indicated by common sense and expediency, and is even technically unexceptionable. So to hold is not to go as far as the decision in Com. v. Rothermel, 27 Pa. Supe[31]*31rior Ct. 648, goes in declaring a statute whose subject was “game” and “game fish” not obnoxious to the constitutional prohibition against the inclusion of more than one subject. It is suggested that the statutes of the commonwealth dealing with the adulteration, etc., of milk have confined themselves strictly to that; and that the Act of May 25, 1907, P. L. 234, relating to the inspection, etc., of meat deals with meat and meat products and nothing else. But whilst a legislative treatment of the two jointly, as subdivisions of the same subject, would be entitled to considerable weight in requiring them to be so regarded, the circumstance that, for certain purposes coextensive with the entire state, each division was deemed of sufficient importance and magnitude to be dealt with separately can be of no controlling significance as affecting their treatment jointly in local municipal legislation.

2. The fact that the legislature has granted to cities the power of providing for the inspection of milk sold within its limits cannot be disputed. It is expressly conferred upon cities and boroughs generally by the Act of April 20, 1869, P. L. 81, and is clearly comprehended in the general power given to cities of the class to which Reading belongs by the Act of May 23, 1889, P. L. 277, art. V, sec. 3, cl. XXVI, “to make regulations to secure the general health of the inhabitants and to remove and prevent nuisances,”—an important branch of the police power as ordinarily understood. The argument, however, is that the matter of the sale of milk has been covered by certain statutes applicable to the entire state or to cities of the third class, and that therefore there is no longer any room for local legislation such as the ordinance here in question.

The Act of May 25, 1878, P. L. 144, forbade the sale of impure, adulterated or unwholesome milk throughout the state, and in sec. 3 directed the marking of wagons from which milk is sold in cities, etc. Then came the Act of July 7, 1885, P. L. 260, applicable to cities of the second and third classes (according to the classification of cities [32]*32into five classes by the Act of April 11, 1876, P. L. 20, and hence to the city of Reading: see Com. v. Hough, 1 Pa. Dist. Rep. 51, 52). It prohibits the sale, etc., of adulterated milk, or milk to which water or any foreign material has been added or which is produced from cows sick or diseased or fed on putrefying substances,—of skimmed milk unless offered as such,—and of milk below a designated and extremely exacting, not to say impracticable standard of richness, and enacts double and conflicting provisions for the imposition of penalties for its violation, which, as Judge Arnold in the case last cited, at p. 54, says, are “confusing and make it difficult .... to give the act a sensible application.” It also invests inspectors of milk (apparently officers appointed under the authority given to municipalities by the act of 1869) with certain powers and lays down rather extraordinary rules concerning the procedure, evidence and costs in penal proceedings for adulteration, etc., of which the title of the statute gives no notice whatever. For this reason it would seem that this enactment must be regarded as offending against sec. 3, art. Ill, of the constitution. It may be also that, in' view of the decision in Ayars’s App., 122 Pa. 266, it ought to be held void under sec. 7 of the same article as prohibited special legislation, because based upon an unlawful classification of cities and by reference to the same applying to but part of what constitutes the third class under the lawful classification made in the Act of May 23, 1874, P. L. 231, and not intended to reach the whole of that class,—the act of 1885 being perhaps distinguishable from the Act of May 13, 1887, P. L. 108, passed upon in Com. v. Smoulter, 126 Pa. 137; Com. v. Miller, 126 Pa. 157; Liem’s App., 9 Pa. Superior Ct.

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Bluebook (online)
45 Pa. Super. 28, 1910 Pa. Super. LEXIS 238, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/reading-city-v-miller-pasuperct-1910.