Case Digest: Velasco v. Villegas, 120 SCRA 568, G.R. No. L-24153, February 14, 1983

Taxation | Taxation Distinguished from Other Inherent Powers and Impositions

Facts: 
  • City of Manila Ordinance No. 4964 prohibits any operator of any barber shop to conduct the business of massaging customers or other persons in any adjacent room or rooms of said barber shop, or in any room or rooms within the same building where the barber shop is located as long as the operator of the barber shop and the room where massaging is conducted is the same person.
  • The lower court dismissed a suit for declaratory relief challenging the constitutionality of Ordinance No. 4964 as it amounts to a deprivation of property of petitioners-appellants of their means of livelihood without due process of law.
Issue: Whether Ordinance No. 4964 is unconstitutional as it amounts to a deprivation of property of petitioners-appellants of their means of livelihood without due process of law. NO

Held:
The attack against the validity cannot succeed. As pointed out in the brief of respondents-appellees, it is a police power measure.
The objectives behind its enactment are: 
  1. To be able to impose payment of the license fee for engaging in the business of massage clinic under Ordinance No. 3659 as amended by Ordinance 4767, an entirely different measure than the ordinance regulating the business of barbershops and
  2. in order to forestall possible immorality which might grow out of the construction of separate rooms for massage of customers.
This Court has been most liberal in sustaining ordinances based on the general welfare clause. 
As far back as U.S. v. Salaveria, 4 a 1918 decision, this Court through Justice Malcolm made clear the significance and scope of such a clause, which "delegates in statutory form the police power to a municipality. 

As above stated, this clause has been given wide application by municipal authorities and has in its relation to the particular circumstances of the case been liberally construed by the courts. Such, it is well to really is the progressive view of Philippine jurisprudence. As it was then, so it has continued to be. There is no showing, therefore, of the unconstitutionality of such ordinance.

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