April 16, 2024 - Epoch Times
11:38
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| Three days ago, in a unanimous decision, the U.S. | |
| Supreme Court delivered a rare victory for American property owners. | |
| Specifically, the Supreme Court ruling curbs the power of local governments throughout all of America to impose permitting fees. | |
| Or in other words, it stops local municipalities from being able to use the permitting process to force both property owners as well as developers to pay huge fees. | |
| Let's go through the details of the case together, including what it means for common Americans like you and me. | |
| And before we jump into the specifics, I want to quickly read to you the text of the 5th and 14th amendments, because they are relevant to this particular case. | |
| In regards to the 5th amendment, here's what it says in a relevant part. | |
| Quote, No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. | |
| This is what's known as the Takings Clause of the U.S. | |
| Constitution, and it broadly states that if the government wants to take property from you, they have to compensate you for it accordingly, in a just manner. | |
| Likewise, the same principle is echoed in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which says this in relevant part, quote, No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. | |
| Meaning that the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment is now applied to the states as well. | |
| And so, keeping these two provisions of the U.S. | |
| Constitution in mind, we get to the case of Mr. George Sheets. | |
| Back in 2016, George and his wife bought a vacant plot of land over in California with the intention being to build a small manufactured home on the property and to live there in retirement. | |
| Basically, you can say the American dream. | |
| Building a home on beautiful California land over in El Dorado County and living there with your wife in your sunset years. | |
| However, when George went to get a building permit from the county, he was told that on top of everything else, he would have to pay a $23,000 traffic impact fee. | |
| "George Sheets built a career and livelihood as an engineering contractor and consultant in Northern California. | |
| In 2016, he began preparing for retirement and bought a vacant lot in rural El Dorado County for a small manufactured home where he and his wife would live and raise their grandson. | |
| George knows the ropes and red tape involved in new construction, and he figured the process would be easier for a manufactured home because it's already built and had past necessary government inspections." Once his land was ready, and all George needed was a county building permit, he was stunned when told he could have his permit, but only if he paid a so-called traffic impact fee of $23,420. | |
| The county claimed it was bound by law to charge the fee for road work his project might cause, although It provided no evidence tying any future road work to any public cost or impact imposed by Georgia's project. | |
| Meaning that their rationale was that, in theory, Georgia's building project might require cars, trucks, tractors, excavators, and so on, on the property, and then after it's built, it'll probably result in more traffic in general, and he will therefore have to compensate the county for the roads, well, at least according to the law that was put on the books. | |
| Now, because there was no way around it, George did wind up paying the $23,000 fee, but then subsequently he sued the county in order to get a refund, arguing that this traffic impact fee was unconstitutional exaction. | |
| Quote, George's lawyers argued this meant that the fee was imposed without any evidence tying the construction project to any specific public costs or impacts, and that the fee financing the unrelated road improvements bore neither an essential nexus | |
| Meaning that as a practical matter, the lawyers were arguing that the county was essentially just taking money from Mr. George Sheets in order to fund unrelated improvements to the roads, without them providing any sort of evidence for the specific cost or impact that his construction project would have on the roads. | |
| And as such, George's lawyers accused the county of trying to impose an unconstitutional exaction. | |
| Quote, An exaction is a condition for development imposed on a developer to offset the cost of the project to a local government. | |
| It is similar to an impact fee, which is a direct payment made to a municipality in place of conditions being imposed on the development. | |
| Which is of course the exact type of fee that George was being charged. | |
| Now, Georgia's legal team, they were using three Supreme Court precedents to build their overall case. | |
| Specifically, quote, "The Supreme Court's 1987 decision in Nolan v. | |
| California Coastal Commission struck down certain government demands for land in exchange for a permit as out-and-out plan of extortion. | |
| The ruling determined that all permit conditions imposed on land development must relate to actual harm caused by the development. | |
| The court expanded Nolan's scope in 1994, ruling in Dolan v. City of Tagard that government demands must be sufficiently proportional to the actual impacts of the proposed rule. | |
| Then, in 2013, the court extended the precedents set in both Nolan and Dolan to permit fees in another case, Coons v. St. | |
| John's River Water Management District. | |
| That is, the government can now weaponize the permitting process to extort more land or money from property owners than is appropriate. | |
| And so essentially, since the year 1987, Supreme Court precedents have been set one after the other, chipping away at the government's ability to impose permit fees on landowners and developers. | |
| However, Eldorado County found a loophole in these precedents, and they used that loophole in their defense at the lower court level. | |
| Basically, these earlier Supreme Court cases, they focused on permitting fees and conditions that were set by bureaucrats in local government, not by the laws on the books. | |
| And so, the legal team for the county, they made the counter-argument that since their permitting fees came from an actual law that was on the books, not from just some bureaucrats, it was okay, because it fell outside of the purview set by previous Supreme Court precedents. | |
| And interestingly, since the year 2016, when this case first began, the lower courts have been buying the argument, with even the California Court of Appeals ruling that since the traffic impact fee was imposed by an actual piece of legislation, it was legal. | |
| However, Mr. Sheets and his legal team, they appealed that decision all the way up to the US Supreme Court, who as I mentioned earlier, just three days ago, ruled in his favor. | |
| In a 9-0 unanimous decision, the U.S. | |
| Supreme Court rejected the logic of the lower courts and they wrote this in their majority opinion. | |
| And by the way, I'll mention that the majority opinion was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. | |
| The California Court of Appeal rejected Mr. Sheets' argument because the traffic impact fee was imposed by legislation, and according to the court, Nolan and Dolan apply only to permit conditions imposed on an ad hoc basis by administrators. | |
| That is incorrect. | |
| The Takings Clause of the U.S. | |
| Constitution does not distinguish between legislative and administrative permit conditions. | |
| Nothing in constitutional text, history, or precedent supports exempting legislatures from ordinary taking rules, and the text of the Constitution itself is not limited to a specific branch of government. | |
| Both the clause and the 14th Amendment, which applies the clause to the states through the doctrine of incorporation, do not single out legislative acts for special treatment. | |
| The 14th Amendment limits the authority of each state to an undivided whole. | |
| So there is no textual justification for saying that the existence or the scope of a state's power to expropriate private property without just compensation varies according to the branch of government affecting the expropriation. | |
| Alright, just to pause here for a super quick moment, listen. | |
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| Meaning, in plain English, that the court determined that the 5th and 14th amendments don't apply only to bureaucrats, but also to lawmakers. | |
| The Supreme Court, they then went ahead and struck down the judgment from the Appeals Court, and they remanded the case back down to the lower court to be finished up. | |
| Meaning, as a practical matter, that eight full years after paying the $23,000 traffic impact fee, Mr. Sheets is very close to getting a refund. | |
| Although, perhaps it is worth mentioning that because of inflation, the $23,000 he's about to get back is now the equivalent of about $18,000 back in the year 2016, meaning that inflation during this 8-year-long legal battle has stolen about $5,000 from him on top of all the legal costs as well as the time that he's actually invested into this particular case. | |
| Regardless, outside of just this case and what it means for Mr. George Sheets, the ruling has implications for every landowner and developer here in America, summarized quite well on the website of the legal team. | |
| quote, Supreme Court precedent recognizes that while local governments can charge fees to mitigate for actual public impacts caused by a private project, demanding property in an amount that goes above and beyond that mitigation standard is a taking. | |
| This is true whether imposed by bureaucrats or lawmakers. | |
| Meaning that as of three days ago, regardless of whether it's a bureaucratic policy or it's an actual law on the books, either way, way, local governments cannot just demand that you pay a fee that is not proportional to an actual honest evaluation of the impact that your project will have on the local community. | |
| If you'd like to go through the actual majority opinion that came out of the U.S. Supreme Court in this particular case, I'll throw a link to the PDF version of it. | |
| You'll be able to find it down in the description box below, which I should mention is that little description box right below those like and subscribe buttons, both of which I hope you take a quick moment to smash so that this information can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
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| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epic Times. |
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