Court rules for property owner in building fee dispute

OPINION ANALYSIS

California house owner George Sheetz received a victory on the Supreme Courtroom on Friday in his problem to the constitutionality of a payment that he was required to pay the county to obtain a allow to construct his house. In a unanimous determination authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the justices agreed with Sheetz that circumstances on constructing permits ought to be topic to heightened scrutiny even when they have been licensed by laws, fairly than imposed on a person foundation by directors.

The choice was a comparatively slim one which didn’t come as a lot of a shock after the oral argument in January, at which Justice Neil Gorsuch had noticed that each Sheetz and the county have been in “radical settlement” on the query that the court docket had agreed to determine. The justices on Friday answered solely that query – in Sheetz’s favor – and despatched the case again to the state courts for an additional look in gentle of the Supreme Courtroom’s determination.

The dispute started in 2016, when Sheetz needed to construct a manufactured house on so much that he owns in Placerville, Calif. El Dorado County, the place the lot is positioned, advised Sheetz that he can be required to pay “visitors influence mitigation charges” earlier than he may obtain a constructing allow. Sheetz paid the payment, however he additionally went to state court docket to problem the payment’s constitutionality.

Sheetz argued that the payment violated the Fifth Modification’s takings clause, which bars the federal government from taking non-public property for public use “with out simply compensation.” He advised the state courts that to find out whether or not the payment passes constitutional muster, they need to apply the take a look at outlined by the Supreme Courtroom in two property rights circumstances, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard, Oregon. These circumstances, taken collectively, maintain that if a authorities desires to require somebody to surrender property in alternate for a land-use allow, it should present that such a situation is carefully associated and roughly proportional to the results of the proposed land use. In Sheetz’s case, he argued, they meant that the county was required to make a case-by-case dedication that the $24,000 payment was essential to offset the influence of congestion attributable to his undertaking.

The state courts declined Sheetz’s suggestion. They concluded that the Nollan/Dolan take a look at solely applies to charges imposed on a person foundation, fairly than charges – just like the visitors influence mitigation payment – licensed by laws.

The Supreme Courtroom on Friday disagreed. In her 11-page opinion for a unanimous court docket, Barrett defined that nothing within the textual content of the Structure signifies that the takings clause doesn’t apply to charges imposed by legislatures. The identical is true, she continued, for the historical past of the takings clause. “In reality,” she wrote, “particular deference for legislative takings would have made little sense traditionally, as a result of laws was the standard method that governments exercised their eminent area energy.” Nor, she added, do the Supreme Courtroom’s circumstances decoding the takings clause distinguish in any method “between laws and different official acts.”

Barrett emphasised that the court docket’s ruling didn’t resolve among the different points raised by Sheetz’s problem relating to the validity of the payment – “together with whether or not a allow situation imposed on a category of properties should be tailor-made with the identical diploma of specificity as a allow situation that targets a selected growth.” The state appeals court docket didn’t weigh in on this or different unresolved questions, Barrett defined, as a result of it “proceeded from the faulty premise that legislative allow circumstances are categorically exempt from the necessities of Nollan and Dolan.” “Whether or not the events’ different arguments are preserved and the way they bear on Sheetz’s authorized problem are,” Barrett concluded, “for the state courts to think about within the first occasion.”

Three totally different justices wrote transient concurring opinions during which they weighed in on among the points that they raised on the oral argument and among the questions left unanswered by the court docket’s ruling. Justice Sonia Sotomayor had in January pointed to different property-related charges that governments typically impose and questioned whether or not the takings clause applies to Sheetz’s case in any respect. In an opinion joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, she argued that Nollan and Dolan solely apply if the payment would have been a taking of property requiring authorities compensation if the federal government had imposed it outdoors the allowing course of. That query, Sotomayor indicated, stays open in Sheetz’s case.

For Gorsuch, the reply to the query “whether or not the Nollan/Dolan take a look at operates totally different when an alleged taking impacts a ‘class of properties’ fairly than a ‘explicit growth’” was clear: “Nothing about that take a look at is dependent upon whether or not the federal government imposes the challenged situation on a big class of properties or a single tract or one thing in between.”

However in a one-paragraph opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh – joined by Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan – wrote individually to emphasize that the court docket had “explicitly decline[d] to determine” the query flagged by Gorsuch in his concurring opinion. Subsequently, Kavanaugh famous, the court docket’s ruling in Sheetz’s case “doesn’t tackle or prohibit the frequent authorities follow of imposing allow circumstances, similar to influence charges, on new developments via cheap formulation or schedules that assess the influence of lessons of growth fairly than the influence of particular parcels of property.” Furthermore, Kavanaugh confused, “no prior determination of this Courtroom has addressed or prohibited that longstanding follow.”

This text was originally published at Howe on the Court.