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This comment was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.
Nine years ago, preparing for his retirement, engineer George Sish bought a plot of rural land in El Dorado County and applied for a district permit to put a manufactured home on his plot.
Little knew that what he thought would be a routine administrative deal would become a legal dispute that would make his laborious path through the California courts, he would come to the US Supreme Court – where he won a unanimous ruling – and now he returns to the California judicial system with California with the California judicial system the possible result is still not sureS
El Dorado County was ready to give its SHEETZ permit, but only if it pays a fee of $ 23,420 to compensate for the supposed effects of traffic in the County and the highway. The tax is the result of a Commonplace Adopted by the district supervisory authorities in 2004 and amended two years later in order to impose a “tax reduction fee” as a condition for obtaining a building permit.
Sheetz paid the fee under protest but filed a lawsuit against the county, claiming to have violated the state A law of mitigation feeWhich requires such fees to have reasonable relations with both proposed development and its impact on public facilities, such as road roads. He also claims that the fee has violated the US Supreme Court’s decisions on property issues, declaring that excessive fees can be a form of blackmail.
Sheetz lost in the court court stating that the laws and decisions regulating mitigation fees do not apply when they are adopted through legislative actions, such as the El Dorado County Movement fee. In 2022, a tri -member state appellate court panel unanimously agreed that fees are legally validS The Supreme Court of the State denied the case.
Sheetz’s lawyers and Pacific Legal Foundation, The organization of Sacramento, which specializes in the rights of property rights, among other things, brought his case to the US Supreme Court. Last year, it unanimously rejected the lower court disputes This legislative fees were exempted by the Supreme Court’s Law and the Lower Decisions of the Supreme Court.
“There is no basis for providing property rights less protection in the hands of legislators than administrators,” writes justice Amy Connie Barrett in the decision, citing the fifth amendment forbidding arbitrary “claims” of ownership. “The claim clause applies equally to both, which means that it prohibits legislative organizations and agencies from imposing non-constitutional conditions on land use permits.”
The Pacific Foundation has welcomed the decision as door through which the governments claiming exemption from legislative acts may impose fees without restriction.
“The government’s fee was nothing more than an excessive ransom to pay permission to build a small, home,” the foundation said at the time. “It was unfairly imposed on costs that had nothing to do with his project.”
One may think that the unanimous decision of the frequently divided Supreme Court may have settled the issue, but it did not.
While the Supreme Court dismissed the decision of the Court of Appeal in California, he sent the case back to “further proceedings, which did not contradict this opinion”. This opened the door to the State Court of Appeal to have another move.
Last month, she rudely acknowledges the Supreme Court’s decision that the legislative fees are not exempt from control, “contrary to the regulated law of California.” However, declare that the fee imposed on Sheetz is “not an unconstitutional condition imposed on the use of the land in violation of the fifth amendment clause. Accordingly, we again confirm the decision.”
In other words, the case returned when it started nearly a decade ago, with a $ 23,420 mitigation fee confirmed by three court rulings, regardless of what the US Supreme Court said.
We probably haven’t heard the last word yet.
This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.