## Facts

- WHS Realty Co. owned a 140-unit garden apartment complex in Morristown consisting solely of rental units.
- Morristown adopted a sanitation ordinance providing free municipal garbage collection to:
  - single-family homes and other residential buildings with three or fewer dwelling units; and
  - condominium complexes with individually owned units, subject to conditions.
- The ordinance denied free municipal garbage collection to residential buildings with four or more units operated as rental apartments; those owners had to arrange and pay for private collection.
- Morristown stated that the ordinance aimed to foster homeownership and also reflected fiscal and administrative limits on expanding municipal sanitation services.
- WHS challenged the ordinance as unconstitutional disparate treatment because it paid municipal taxes yet was excluded from a basic municipal service.

## Issues

1. Whether Morristown’s differential provision of free municipal garbage collection to small dwellings and individually owned condominiums, but not to large multi-family rental complexes, violated equal protection under the U.S. and New Jersey Constitutions.
2. Whether fostering homeownership and limiting the cost and scope of municipal garbage collection are legitimate governmental objectives that can support the ordinance.
3. Whether the ordinance’s classification is rationally related to those objectives under rational-basis review.

## Decision

- The Appellate Division treated the ordinance’s constitutionality as resolved by controlling precedent upholding the ordinance under rational-basis review.
- The court accepted that the ordinance did not involve a suspect class or a fundamental right and therefore required only rational-basis scrutiny.
- The court concluded the classification was supported by conceivable rational reasons, including encouraging homeownership and containing municipal sanitation costs.
- The ordinance remained in effect, and WHS did not obtain invalidation or extension of free municipal garbage collection to its rental complex.

## Legal Principles

- When no suspect classification or fundamental right is implicated, equal protection challenges to municipal economic or social welfare measures are evaluated under rational-basis review.
- A classification is valid if it is rationally related to any legitimate governmental purpose; the government need not provide empirical proof of effectiveness.
- Municipalities have broad discretion in allocating services and managing fiscal and administrative burdens, and courts generally defer to those policy judgments under rational-basis review.
- Differential treatment among property owners in the provision of municipal services does not violate equal protection merely because all taxpayers contribute to municipal revenues.

## Conclusion

Morristown’s ordinance limiting free municipal garbage collection to smaller residential properties and individually owned condominiums, while excluding large rental apartment complexes, survived rational-basis equal protection review because the classification was reasonably related to legitimate goals such as fostering homeownership and controlling municipal sanitation costs.


WHS Realty Co. v. Town of Morristown, 733 A.2d 1206 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 1999)