|
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the Constitution does
not require governments to pay compensation to landowners
when agencies temporarily prohibit them from building on their
land, a decision that strengthens the hand of environmental
regulators against the conservative-led "property rights"
movement.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court rejected the argument of a
group of California property owners that government freezes
on development are tantamount to official seizures -- known
in legal parlance as "takings" -- of private property
and require compensation. Rather, the court held that such
claims must be considered case by case, balanced against other
factors such as the duration of a development moratorium and
the government's reasons for it.
"Land-use regulations are ubiquitous and most of them
impact property values in some tangential way -- often in
completely unanticipated ways," Justice John Paul Stevens
wrote in the opinion for the court. "Treating them all
as . . . takings would transform government regulation into
a luxury few governments could afford."
In previous cases, the Supreme Court had been receptive to
property owners' claims of "regulatory takings."
But yesterday's ruling signaled that the court's past support
was not unqualified, and that a majority of the justices may
not share the property-rights movement's most ambitious goals.
As a result, a legal cloud has been lifted from over what
a friend-of-the-court brief from 22 state governments called
"a vital planning tool" for dealing with environmental
concerns, traffic and demands for services. The Bush administration
also supported the regulators.
The court's opinion included examples of recent building
moratoriums in jurisdictions ranging from Fort Lauderdale,
Fla., where officials were setting new standards for beachfront
construction, to Aboite Township, Ind., which wanted to allow
time for water and sewage improvements.
"We have not had the Supreme Court in any recent takings
case talking about the necessity for government regulation
of land use for preserving the environment, and Justice Stevens
laid out the rationale," said Richard Lazarus, a professor
of environmental law at Georgetown University who represented
regulators in this case. "That is going to be important
both to planners and the lower courts."
The case emerged out of a decades-long legal battle between
several hundred families that bought property during the 1970s
around Lake Tahoe, which straddles the California-Nevada border,
and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), a bi-state
body responsible for protecting the lake's environment.
In 1981, the TRPA ordered the first of two moratoriums on
development, eventually totaling 32 months. The agency said
it needed time to draw up a long-term policy for managing
building-related runoff that threatened to cloud the lake's
transparent water.
Because of ensuing litigation, however, the temporary moratorium
turned into a de facto ban on development that has left the
families still without the lakeside homes they dreamed of
years ago when they sank large sums of money into their Tahoe
property.
The Supreme Court has recently ruled in favor of some claims
that the denial of land use through regulation should trigger
the same Fifth Amendment guarantee of "just compensation"
as do outright seizures of property by government.
Last year, the court held that a Rhode Island property owner
could press such a claim even though he had bought his property
after a regulation limiting its use was enacted.
Because of that history, coupled with the fact that in this
case such an evident loss had been suffered by a sympathetic
group of middle-class people, some in the property-rights
movement viewed the case as a vehicle for persuading the court
to expand its takings doctrine even further.
It is unfair, property-rights supporters argued, for government
to impose all the costs of saving a public resource on one
group of citizens.
"No one in this case doubted the environmental purpose
of preserving Lake Tahoe from soil runoff triggered by construction,"
said Douglas W. Kmiec, dean of Catholic University Law School.
"The question, however, was whether all of us who enjoy
that beauty should pay to maintain it or only those unlucky
few who . . . used their family savings to buy developable
lots, but only after the first generation of housing had already
caused some environmental harm."
But there were indications yesterday that the property owners,
in seeking a ruling that every freeze on development, regardless
of duration, constitutes a taking requiring compensation,
had asked the court for too much, prompting it to issue an
opinion that may have defined new limits on its past support
for property rights.
The court's two swing-vote justices, moderate conservatives
Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy, joined with Stevens
and liberals David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen
G. Breyer in the six-member majority.
Stevens's opinion quoted frequently from O'Connor's past
writings to support his view that "the extreme categorical
rule that any deprivation of all economic use, no matter how
brief, constitutes a compensable taking surely cannot be sustained."
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist dissented in the case,
joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Rehnquist argued that the TRPA was responsible for six years
of the time in which the property owners were not allowed
to build, and noted that they were entitled to compensation
for a taking because "a ban on all development lasting
almost six years does not resemble any traditional land-use
planning device."
|
