Webster v. Hopewell Borough

Citations

• 19 Pa. Super. 549
• 1902 Pa. Super. LEXIS 149

Syllabus

<p>Boroughs — Costs—Annulment of charter.</p> <p>The legislation regulating the incorporation of boroughs, and the annulment of the charters thereof, does not authorize the taxation of any costs in such proceedings. The active participants in such controversies with regard to the form of local government which the citizens prefer are, under the law as it now stands, presumed to be either acting for their own personal interest, or, if actuated by public spirit, to understand that the service which they are rendering the public will only be compensated by the consciousness that they have come up to their own standard of the obligations of the citizen. Those who have subpoenaed witnesses must pay them, and those who have required the clerk of courts to perform services must pay his legal fees, but they must consider such expenditures as voluntarily made for the public good.</p> <p>A motion by a borough council to pay “ all legal costs accruing in the lawsuit in defending the borough charter in the courts,” is ineffectual because (1) there are no “ legal costs ” which the borough can pay; (2) even if the borough has authority to appropriate the public money to pay private individuals for moneys which they had expended in such a proceeding, the resolution is invalid inasmuch as the amount of the appropriation is not fixed; (3) as the legislature had imposed no duty upon the municipality or any officer thereof, with regard to such a proceeding, the borough could not be a party to the proceeding, and could not appropriate money for such a proceeding either in the first instance, or subsequently to reimburse private individuals who had made the expenditure; (4) there was no moral obligation to reimburse individuals inasmuch as the moral obligation which is sufficient to sustain an assumption of the debt by a municipality must grow out of a matter with regard to which the municipality is charged with some duty.</p> <p>While a borough has a standing to ljaise any question as