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Neeley v. West Orange-Cove Consolidated Independent School Dist.11/22/2005
ors to recommend their own abolition, or lower salaries for themselves or any employees. Such potential conflicts between the interests of school districts and school families prevent the former from claiming standing to represent the latter. We have recognized representative standing in some circumstances, and sometimes state agencies may assert standing on behalf of their constituents. But we have done so only when the goals of a group and its members are so closely aligned that there is no reason to require participation by one in a suit by the other. That is not the case here.
In its final analysis, the Court dispenses with standing generally, because (1) students and families were free to intervene, and (2) the districts could find students and families to back their claims. Even if we assume that poor families can hire lawyers, or school districts can recruit sham plaintiffs to bolster their claims, it is hard to see what that has to do with the standing of the parties actually before us. More important, such arguments could be made by every party who lacks standing, including millions of taxpayers, or the father whose challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance was recently rejected for lack of standing. Normally, this Court strictly enforces standing so that we retain our proper role; hopefully today's exception is good for this case only.
Standing is not a technicality; it is essential to any court's authority to decide a case. We cannot abandon it in noteworthy cases; indeed, that is when adherence to legal standards is most important. As the United States Supreme Court recently noted, courts must be "especially rigorous" in requiring proper standing when asked to declare the actions of the other two branches of government unconstitutional. The school districts alone cannot meet such standards here.
III. Article VIII & Discretion
No State ad valorem taxes shall be levied upon any property within this State.
Texas Constitution, Article VIII, ยง 1-e
The 47 plaintiffs, mostly property-rich school districts, bring a claim that Article VIII, section 1-e of the Texas Constitution is violated by a tax-rate ceiling in a single subpart of a single statute.
Unlike Article VII, Article VIII was intended to benefit school districts, and thus they have standing to assert this claim.
In Edgewood III, we declined to adopt a precise test for violations of Article VIII because state control over property taxes presents "a spectrum of possibilities." Instead, we held that a tax violates Article VIII if the State so completely controls the levy, assessment, and disbursement of revenue that school districts are "without meaningful discretion." In Edgewood IV, we explained that districts lose such discretion when they are "forced to tax at the maximum allowable rate just to provide a general diffusion of knowledge."
This appeal turns on whether the plaintiffs proved they were "forced" to tax at the maximum rate. In reviewing the evidence, the Court contradicts everything we have said about such evidence before, and adds new "factors" we apparently overlooked before. This is too imprecise; a legal standard cannot turn on entirely different evidence from one case to the next.
A. The Wrong Standard: Everybody Else Does It
The Court points to several statewide trends as evidence of an Article VIII violation. But in our previous cases, we held that evidence just like this could not show an Article VIII violation.
First, my colleagues suggest that school districts are forced to tax at maximum rates because about half of them do. While we have never stated in detail what the
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