ST. PAUL, Minn. (Legal Newsline) - A taxpayer can't challenge a Minnesota school district's preference for helping minority teachers keep their jobs, the state Supreme Court has ruled.
Owing the result to a decision reached last year in a different case involving felon-voters, the state's highest court found on Jan. 8 taxpayers can only file legal challenges against government entities when the case mostly involves the disbursements of public funds.
Justice Karl Procaccini wrote the court's majority opinion after he and the other justices received amicus briefs from groups like the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, the Minnesota Public Employer Labor Relations Association and Teamsters Local 320.
Plaintiff Deborah Jane Clapp pays property taxes that are then used to pay Minneapolis teachers. And pursuant to Article 15 in a recent collective bargaining agreement, minority teachers are exempt from seniority-based layoffs and reassignments, Clapp complains.
"Clapp's complaint alleges only that there will be an expenditure of public funds used to implement and monitor compliance with Article 15," Procaccini wrote.
"That expenditure is merely incidental to the substantive governmental action - alleged 'preferences, protections, and privileges for certain public school teachers' - that Clapp seeks to challenge.
"Clapp does not have taxpayer standing because an unlawful disbursement of government funds is not the central disputes in this case."
The CBA between Minneapolis Public Schools and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers Local 59 was reached after a three-week strike in 2022. Article 15 made teachers from underrepresented populations exempt from seniority-based layoffs and reassignments, leading Clapp and Judicial Watch to sue.
They said Article 15 provides preferences for certain teachers on the basis of race and/or ethnicity. Before the provision, teachers were laid off, reassigned and reinstated in order of seniority, the suit says, but now minority teachers are exempt.
The trial court agreed with the defendants, who include the superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools, that Clapp lacked standing to sue. That was overturned by the state Court of Appeals.
Before the issue came to the Supreme Court, the justices decided Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Hunt in 2024. That case involved a challenge to a 2023 law that restored voting rights to felons who were not currently incarcerated.
Minnesota Voters Alliance lacked standing to sue, the high court ruled, because the disbursement of government funds in the Re-Enfranchisement Act were incidental to the case.
That ruling directly applied to Clapp's case.
"Clapp's argument in support of her standing as a taxpayer in this case are like those rejected in Hunt," Procaccini wrote.
"The Hunt plaintiffs sought to invoke taxpayer standing based on the Legislature's appropriation of public funds to implement the Re-Enfranchisement Act and alleged that, because the new voting provision violated (the Minnesota Constitution), it was unlawful to use public funds to notify and educate people about the new voting provision.
"We rejected that argument and concluded that the plaintiffs lacked taxpayer standing because the alleged unlawful expenditures of public funds were merely incidental to the act at the center of the lawsuit. Our observations in Hunt are no less true here."