Azar v. City of Columbia

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For more than a decade, the City of Columbia has been allocating substantial amounts of revenue generated from user fees for water and sewer services to its General Fund and for economic development purposes. Appellants filed this action contending the City's practices violated sections 6-1-330 and 6-21-440 of the South Carolina Code. The trial court granted the City summary judgment. Because there were genuine issues of material fact as to whether the City's expenditures of water and sewer revenues were lawful, the Supreme Court reversed and remanded for further proceedings to determine whether the funds transferred into the City's General Fund were properly considered "surplus revenues" under section 6-21-440 and could therefore be spent for unrelated purposes and whether the City's direct economic-development expenditures bore a sufficient nexus to its provision of water and sewer services such that they would be considered "related" expenditures under the terms of section 6-1-330(B) of the South Carolina Code. View "Azar v. City of Columbia" on Justia Law