## Facts

- Fairfax County enacted a “Beverage Container Ordinance,” later amended to require every nonalcoholic beverage container sold or offered for sale in the county to carry a cash refund value of at least five cents.
- The ordinance’s stated purpose was litter and solid-waste reduction through a mandatory deposit-refund requirement.
- Before the ordinance took effect, a supermarket operator and soft-drink bottlers/distributors filed an equity action seeking to enjoin enforcement, asserting the county lacked legislative authority to adopt such a deposit-refund scheme.
- The circuit court upheld the ordinance and dismissed the complaint.
- On appeal, review was limited to whether the county board had legislative authority to enact the ordinance.

## Issues

1. Whether Fairfax County possessed legislative authority, under powers granted by the General Assembly and construed under the Dillon Rule, to require a minimum cash refund value on nonalcoholic beverage containers.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of Virginia reversed.
- The court held the county board lacked authority to enact the beverage-container deposit-refund ordinance.
- The ordinance was invalid as an ultra vires exercise of local legislative power.

## Legal Principles

- Under the Dillon Rule, local governments have only: (1) powers expressly granted by the legislature, (2) powers necessarily or fairly implied from express grants, and (3) powers essential and indispensable to the locality’s purposes; any fair, reasonable doubt is resolved against the locality.
- Statutes authorizing litter abatement, garbage removal requirements, highway anti-dumping measures, or general “health, safety, and welfare” ordinances do not, without specific legislative authorization, permit a locality to impose a countywide deposit-refund system as a condition of selling nonalcoholic beverages.
- A broad general-welfare grant cannot be used to create a new economic regulatory program of substantial scope absent clear legislative authorization.
- A regulation is not “necessarily implied” or “essential and indispensable” to an authorized objective merely because it relates to that objective; where the legislature has provided other authorized methods, a locality cannot infer authority for materially different regulatory schemes.

## Conclusion

The court invalidated Fairfax County’s beverage-container deposit ordinance because the General Assembly had not expressly or impliedly granted counties authority to mandate refundable deposits on nonalcoholic beverage containers under Virginia’s Dillon Rule framework.


Tabler v. Bd. of Supervisors of Fairfax Cnty., 221 Va. 200, 269 S.E.2d 358 (Va. 1980)