Ball v. James

Justice Stewart delivered the opinion of the Court.

This appeal concerns the constitutionality of the system for electing the directors of a large water reclamation district in Arizona, a system which, in essence, limits voting eligibility to landowners and apportions voting power according to the amount of land a voter owns. The case requires us to consider whether the peculiarly narrow function of this local governmental body and the special relationship of one class of citizens to that body releases it from the strict demands of the one-person, one-vote principle of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Reynolds v. Sims (1964).

The public entity at issue here is the Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District, which stores and delivers untreated water to the owners of land comprising 236,000 acres in central Arizona. The District, formed as a governmental entity in 1937, subsidizes its water operations by selling electricity, and has become the supplier of electric power for hundreds of thousands of people in an area including a large part of metropolitan Phoenix. . . .

Under the new statutory scheme, which is essentially the one at issue in this case, the legislature allowed the district to limit voting for its directors to voters, otherwise regularly qualified under state law, who own land within the district, and to apportion voting power among those landowners according to the number of acres owned. . . .

This lawsuit was brought by a class of registered voters who live within the geographic boundaries of the District, and who own either no land or less than an acre of land within the District. The complaint alleged that the District enjoys such governmental powers as the power to condemn land, to sell tax-exempt bonds, and to levy taxes on real property. It also alleged that because the District sells electricity to virtually half the population of Arizona, and because, through its water operations, it can exercise significant influence on flood control and environmental management within its boundaries, the District's policies and actions have a substantial effect on all people who live within the District, regardless of property ownership. Seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, the appellees claimed that the acreage-based scheme for electing directors of the District violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

[T]his Court marked a significant exception to that principle by upholding a state law permitting only landowners to vote in the election of directors of a water district: Salyer Land Co. v. Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District (1973). The decision in Salyer resulted from this Court's examination of the nature of the services provided by the water district in that case, and its conclusion that "by reason of its special limited purpose and of the disproportionate effect of its activities on landowners as a group," the water district there was not subject to the strict one-person, one-vote demands of the Reynolds decision. Accordingly, the Court of Appeals considered the constitutionality of the Salt River District's electoral system by comparing the purposes and effects of the activities of the Salt River District with those of the Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District.

The Court of Appeals stressed that the water district in Salyer covered a sparsely populated area of wholly agricultural land. It also noted that the primary function of the Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District had remained the storage and delivery of water for agriculture, and that the district did not provide such other general public services as utilities. Finally, the Court of Appeals pointed out that the income for the district in Salyer came completely from assessments against the landowners. The Court of Appeals found the Salt River District, at least in its modern form, very different. It pointed out that the Salt River District is a major generator and supplier of hydroelectric power in the State, and that roughly 40% of the water it delivers goes to urban areas for nonagricultural uses. The court therefore concluded that the Salt River District does not serve the sort of special, narrow purpose that proved decisive in Salyer. . . . The court thus concluded that the actual financial burden of running the District has not fallen primarily on the voting landowners, and therefore that the activities of this water district, unlike those of the district in Salyer, do not disproportionately affect landowners as such.

The Court of Appeals was correct in conceiving the question in this case to be whether the purpose of the District is sufficiently specialized and narrow and whether its activities bear on landowners so disproportionately as to distinguish the District from those public entities whose more general governmental functions demand application of the Reynolds principle. We conclude, however, that, in its efforts to distinguish Salyer the Court of Appeals did not apply these criteria correctly to the facts of this case. . . .

The Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District involved there encompassed 193,000 acres, 85% of which were farmed by one or another of four corporations. Salyer Land Co. v. Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District. Under California law, public water districts could acquire, store, conserve, and distribute water, and though the Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District had never chosen to do so, could generate and sell any form of power it saw fit to support its water operations. The costs of the project were assessed against each landowner according to the water benefits the landowner received. At issue in the case was the constitutionality of the scheme for electing the directors of the district, under which only landowners could vote, and voting power was apportioned according to the assessed valuation of the voting landowner's property. The Court recognized that the Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District did exercise "some typical governmental powers," including the power to hire and fire workers, contract for construction of projects, condemn private property, and issue general obligation bonds.

Nevertheless, the Court concluded that the district had "relatively limited authority," because "its primary purpose, indeed the reason for its existence, is to provide for the acquisition, storage, and distribution of water for farming in the Tulare Lake Basin." The Court also noted that the financial burdens of the district could not but fall on the landowners, in proportion to the benefits they received from the district, and that the district's actions therefore disproportionately affected the voting landowners. The Salyer Court thus held that the strictures of Reynolds did not apply to the Tulare District, and proceeded to inquire simply whether the statutory voting scheme based on land valuation at least bore some relevancy to the statute's objectives. The Court concluded that the California Legislature could have reasonably assumed that without voting power apportioned according to the value of their land, the landowners might not have been willing to subject their lands to the lien of the very assessments which made the creation of the district possible.

As noted by the Court of Appeals, the services currently provided by the Salt River District are more diverse and affect far more people than those of the Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District. Whereas the Tulare District included an area entirely devoted to agriculture and populated by only 77 persons, the Salt River District includes almost half the population of the State, including large parts of Phoenix and other cities. Moreover, the Salt River District, unlike the Tulare District, has exercised its statutory power to generate and sell electric power, and has become one of the largest suppliers of such power in the State. Further, whereas all the water delivered by the Tulare District went for agriculture, roughly 40% of the water delivered by the Salt River District goes to urban areas or is used for nonagricultural purposes in farming areas. Finally, whereas all operating costs of the Tulare District were born by the voting landowners through assessments apportioned according to land value, most of the capital and operating costs of the Salt River District have been met through the revenues generated by the selling of electric power. Nevertheless, a careful examination of the Salt River District reveals that, under the principles of the Avery, Hadley, and Salyer cases, these distinctions do not amount to a constitutional difference.

First, the District simply does not exercise the sort of governmental powers that invoke the strict demands of Reynolds. The District cannot impose ad valorem property taxes or sales taxes. It cannot enact any laws governing the conduct of citizens, nor does it administer such normal functions of government as the maintenance of streets, the operation of schools, or sanitation, health, or welfare services. . . .

Second, though they were characterized broadly by the Court of Appeals, even the District's water functions, which constitute the primary and originating purpose of the District, are relatively narrow. The District and Association do not own, sell, or buy water, nor do they control the use of any water they have delivered. The District simply stores water behind its dams, conserves it from loss, and delivers it through project canals. It is true, as the Court of Appeals noted, that as much as 40% of the water delivered by the District goes for nonagricultural purposes. But the distinction between agricultural and urban land is of no special constitutional significance in this context. The constitutionally relevant fact is that all water delivered by the Salt River District, like the water delivered by the Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District, is distributed according to land ownership, and the District does not and cannot control the use to which the landowners who are entitled to the water choose to put it. . . .

Finally, neither the existence nor size of the District's power business affects the legality of its property-based voting scheme. . . . A key part of the Salyer decision was that the voting scheme for a public entity like a water district may constitutionally reflect the narrow primary purpose for which the district is created. In this case, the parties have stipulated that the primary legislative purpose of the District is to store, conserve, and deliver water for use by District landowners . . .

The functions of the Salt River District are therefore of the narrow, special sort which justifies a departure from the popular-election requirement of the Reynolds case. And as in Salyer, an aspect of that limited purpose is the disproportionate relationship the District's functions bear to the specific class of people whom the system makes eligible to vote. The voting landowners are the only residents of the District whose lands are subject to liens to secure District bonds. Only these landowners are subject to the acreage-based taxing power of the District, and voting landowners are the only residents who have ever committed capital to the District through stock assessments charged by the Association. The Salyer opinion did not say that the selected class of voters for a special public entity must be the only parties at all affected by the operations of the entity, or that their entire economic well-being must depend on that entity. Rather, the question was whether the effect of the entity's operations on them was disproportionately greater than the effect on those seeking the vote.

As in the Salyer case, we conclude that the voting scheme for the District is constitutional because it bears a reasonable relationship to its statutory objectives. Here, according to the stipulation of the parties, the subscriptions of land which made the Association and then the District possible might well have never occurred had not the subscribing landowners been assured a special voice in the conduct of the District's business. Therefore, as in Salyer, the State could rationally limit the vote to landowners. Moreover, Arizona could rationally make the weight of their vote dependent upon the number of acres they own, since that number reasonably reflects the relative risks they incurred as landowners and the distribution of the benefits and the burdens of the District's water operations.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.


Justice White, with whom Justice Brennan, Justice Marshall, and Justice Blackmun join, dissenting.

In concluding that the District's "one-acre, one-vote" scheme is constitutional, the Court misapplies the limited exception recognized in Salyer Land Co. v. Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District (1973), on the strained logic that the provision of water and electricity to several hundred thousand citizens is a "peculiarly narrow function." Because the Court misreads our prior cases and its opinion is conceptually unsound, I dissent.

The right to vote is of special importance because the franchise acts to preserve "other basic civil . . . rights." Reynolds v. Sims (1964). It is presumed that "when all citizens are affected in important ways by a governmental decision," the Fourteenth Amendment "does not permit . . . the exclusion of otherwise qualified citizens from the franchise." Any state statute granting the franchise to residents on a selective basis poses the "danger of denying some citizens any effective voice in the governmental affairs which substantially affect their lives." As a result, any classification restricting the franchise, except those involving residence, age, or citizenship, is unconstitutional "unless the district or State can demonstrate that the classification serves a compelling state interest." . . .

To be sure, the Court approved limiting the vote to landowners in electing the board of directors of a Water Storage District in Salyer Land Co. v. Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District. But nothing in Salyer changed the relevant constitutional inquiry. Rather, the Court held the Reynolds-Avery-Kramer line of cases inapplicable to the water district because of its "special limited purpose and the disproportionate effect of its activities on landowners as a group . . . ." Although the water district there involved exercised certain governmental authorities, its purposes were quite narrow. The Water Storage District was also found to have only an insubstantial effect on nonvoters. Only 77 persons lived within its boundaries and most worked for one of the four corporations which owned 85% of the land within the District. On the other hand, the burdens of the District fell entirely on landowners since all of the costs associated with the District's projects were assessed against landowners in proportion to the benefits received. There was "no way that the economic burdens of district operations can fall on residents qua residents. . . ."

The District involved here clearly exercises substantial governmental powers. The District is a municipal corporation organized under the laws of Arizona and is not, in any sense of the word, a private corporation. Pursuant to the Arizona Constitution, such districts are "political subdivisions of the State, and vested with all the rights, privileges and benefits, and entitled to the immunities and exemptions granted municipalities and political subdivisions under this Constitution or any law of the State or of the United States." Under the relevant statute controlling agricultural improvement districts, the District is "a public, political, taxing subdivision of the state, and a municipal corporation to the extent of the powers and privileges conferred by this chapter or granted generally to municipal corporations by the constitution and statutes of the state, including immunity of its property and bonds from taxation." The District's bonds are tax exempt, and its property is not subject to state or local property taxation. This attribute clearly indicates the governmental nature of the District's function. The District also has the power of eminent domain, a matter of some import. The District has also been given the power to enter into a wide range of contractual arrangements to secure energy sources. Inherent in this authorization is the power to control the use and source of energy generated by the District, including the possible use of nuclear power. Obviously, this broad authorization over the field of energy transcends the limited functions of the agricultural water storage district involved in Salyer.

[I]t is indeed curious that the Court would attempt to characterize the District's electrical operations as "incidental" to its water operations, or would consider the power operations to be irrelevant to the legality of the voting scheme. The facts are that in Salyer the burdens of the Water District fell entirely on the landowners who were served by the District. Here the landowners could not themselves afford to finance their own project and turned to a public agency to help them. That agency now subsidizes the storage and delivery of irrigation water for agricultural purposes by selling electricity to the public at prices that neither the voters nor any representative public agency has any right to control. Unlike the situation in Salyer, the financial burden of supplying irrigation water has been shifted from the landowners to the consumers of electricity. At the very least, the structure of the District's indebtedness together with the history of the District's operations compels a finding that the burdens placed upon the lands within the District are so minimal that they cannot possibly serve as a basis for limiting the franchise to property owners.

The purpose and authority of the Salt River District are of extreme public importance. The District affects the daily lives of thousands of citizens who because of the present voting scheme and the powers vested in the District by the State are unable to participate in any meaningful way in the conduct of the District's operations. In my view, the Court of Appeals properly reasoned that the limited exception recognized in Salyer does not save this voting arrangement. I cannot agree with the Court's extension of Salyer to the facts of the case, and its unwise suggestion that the provision of electrical and water services are somehow too private to warrant the Fourteenth Amendment's safeguards. Accordingly, I dissent.