Ashbury

No ordinance or resolution was ever duly passed by the Board of Supervisors for the payment of the $92,000, to compel the auditing whereof this application was made, as the resolutions were not published. (Stats. 1856, p. 164, sec. 68.)

By neither of the resolutions did the Board appropriate any definite sum. The resolution numbered 1132 does not attempt to authorize an expenditure; and by whom the expenditure is to be made, or by what process the exact amount within the sum of $92,000 is tci be ascertained, the resolution fails to show.

The authority could not be to the Board of Supervisors itself, because that Board derives its authority alone from the statutes of our State. Any attempt on the part of that Board to confer a power upon itself to appro]Driate indefinite sums of money above $500, without taking all of the proceedings to that end required by sec. 68 of the Consolidation Act, and fixing the amount definitely by such proceedings, would be nugatory.

The provisions of the Consolidation Act, enacted for the pur ■ pose of guarding the public treasury, are not to be evaded by indirection by means of an appeal. The Board must first have acquired jurisdiction to pass upon…

I find nothing in the Consolidation Act authorizing the Board of Supervisors to pass an appropriation order or ordinance—an order or ordinance in the nature of an Appropriation Act of the General Assembly, by which certain sums of money are set apart in the Treasury for the payment of demands not then allowed or audited, such as the General Appropriation Act for- *132 the two fiscal years succeeding the passage of the act. The Consolidation Act provides for the apportionment of the funds in the treasury, and no order in the nature of an Appropriation Act is necessary. The sixty-eighth section, in providing that “ every ordinance or resolution of the Board of Supervisors providing for * * * the expenditure of public moneys (except for sums less than $500) * * * shall after its introduction in the Board be published,” etc., relates, as I construe those words, to the appropriation of specific sums of money for the demands which have been allowed or are allowed by the ordinance itself. The case does not show the passage of an order of that character, and therefore, as I construe the act, there has been no valid appropriation of money for the payment of the plaintiff’s demand.

It was…