Request By:
Honorable William C. Villines
Mayor, City of Providence
P.O. Box 128
Providence, Kentucky 42450
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; By: Walter C. Herdman, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
This is in answer to your letter of April 9 in which you relate that the city is having problems collecting city property taxes and you would like an opinion concerning the legality of placing the property tax on the utility bills for collection purposes and thereby carry the threat of discontinuing the utility services if the property owners fail to pay their property taxes.
Our response to your question would be that the above procedure would not be legal. Aside from the fact that the property taxes must be collected separately by the tax collector pursuant to KRS 92.580 and 92,590, only utility bills can legally be listed together on a single bill and submitted to the property owner with the penalty of turning off the customer's water supply. See KRS 96.930 to 96.943 regarding garbage collection procedures.
We refer you next to the case of Cassidy v. City of Bowling Green, Ky., 368 S.W.2d 318 (1963), in which the court in upholding the city's right to enforce the collection of the garbage disposal charge by discontinuing the water service said:
"The reasonableness of discontinuing one public service for failure to pay for a related public service was recognized in Rash v. Louisville & Jefferson County Met. Sewer Dist., 309 Ky. 442, 217 S.W.2d 232, and City of Covington v. Sanitation District No. 1, Ky., 301 S.W.2d 885. We are not inclined to say that interdependence is necessarily a controlling factor. However, the record shows that garbage disposal and water supply are closely related from a sanitation standpoint and we can find nothing arbitrary or unreasonable about this method of collecting sewer charges."
Under the circumstances, the city cannot list the individual's property tax on his utility bill whether for the purpose of enforcement or not.