The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that a person doesn’t have to pay property taxes in order to file a taxpayer’s lawsuit accusing a city or county of waste or illegal spending of public funds.

The high court’s seven justices said unanimously that a 1909 law permitting taxpayer’s lawsuits should be interpreted broadly to allow payment of other types of taxes to qualify a person as a plaintiff. The law has “broad remedial purposes,” the court said in an opinion written by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuellar.

“Limiting individual plaintiffs’ use of the statute to those who pay property taxes is simply incompatible with the recognized need to construe the statute broadly,” Cuellar wrote.