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Director, Center for Supreme Court AdvocacyNational Association of Attorneys General
May 6, 2024 | Volume 31, Issue 10
This Report summarizes opinions issued on April 12, 16, and 17, 2024 (Part I).
Opinion
Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, 22-1074.
The Court unanimously held that the Takings Clause does not distinguish between legislative and administrative permit conditions. Petitioner George Sheetz owned property in El Dorado County, California and sought a permit to build a prefabricated home on his residential parcel of land. To deal with the new demand for public services due to recent, significant population growth, the county’s Board of Supervisors, a legislative body, adopted a planning document called the General Plan. Concerning traffic congestion, the General Plan requires developers to pay a traffic impact fee as a condition of receiving a building permit. The fee is based on a rate schedule that considers the type of development and its location within the county. The traffic impact fee for Sheetz to receive his permit to build was $23,420. He paid the fee under protest and sought relief in state court, claiming that conditioning the building permit on paying a traffic impact fee constituted an unlawful “exaction” of money in violation of the Takings Clause. The California Court of Appeal declined to assess Sheetz County’s traffic impact under the essential nexus and rough proportionality test from Nollan v. California Coastal Comm’n, 483 U.S. 825 (1987), and Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 U.S. 374 (1994), based on its view that the test did not apply to “legislatively prescribed monetary fees.” In an opinion by Justice Barrett, the Court vacated and remanded.
The Court found that nothing in constitutional text, history, or precedent supports exempting legislatures from ordinary takings rules. First, the Court pointed out that the Constitution’s text does not limit the Takings Clause to a particular branch of government; nor does the Fourteenth Amendment, which incorporates the Takings Clause against the states. Thus, so “far as the Constitution’s text is concerned, permit conditions imposed by the legislature and other branches stand on equal footing.” Next, the Court found that history supports the same conclusion. The Court explained that for colonial governments before, during, and after the Revolution, “legislation was the conventional way that governments exercised their eminent domain power.”
Finally, the Court emphasized that precedent also did not provide for a legislative exception to the Nollan/Dolan test. Looking at both physical and regulatory takings cases, the Court stated that the “branch of government that authorized the appropriation did not matter to the analysis.” Thus, the Court held that “there is no basis for affording property rights less protection in the hands of legislators than administrators,” and the Takings Clause “applies equally to both—which means that it prohibits legislatures and agencies alike from imposing unconstitutional conditions on land-use permits.” The Court did not address the validity of the traffic impact fee or answer “whether the condition imposed on a class of properties must be tailored with the same degree of specificity as a permit condition that targets a particular development.” Rather, the Court stated whether “the parties’ other arguments are preserved and how they bear on Sheetz’s legal challenge are for the state courts to consider in the first instance.”
There were three separate concurrences filed. Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence, which Justice Jackson joined, focused on the threshold question for the application of Nollan/Dolan scrutiny, which is “whether the permit condition would be a compensable taking if imposed outside the permitting context.” She noted that the question presented in this case did not include that preliminary question “whether the traffic impact fee would be a compensable taking if imposed outside the permitting context.” But Justice Sotomayor noted that the Court is not resolving that question because the California Court of Appeal did not consider it.
Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence highlighted that the Court’s decision did not address whether the Nollan/Dolan test operates differently when an alleged taking affects a class of properties rather than a particular development. Justice Gorsuch maintained that nothing “about that test depends on whether the government imposes the challenged condition on a large class of properties or a single tract or something in between.” Thus, he said that “whether the government owes just compensation for taking your property cannot depend on whether it has taken your neighbor’s’ property too.” Finally, Justice Kavanaugh, with whom Justices Kagan and Jackson joined, concurred. He noted that the Court has never decided and explicitly declined to decide in this case whether a permit condition imposed on a class of properties must be tailored with the same degree of specificity as a permit condition that targets a particular development. The Court’s decision, therefore, “does not address or prohibit the common government practice of imposing permit conditions, such as impact fees, on new developments through reasonable formulas or schedules that assess the impact of classes of development rather than the impact of specific parcels of property.”
NAAG Center for Supreme Court Advocacy Staff
- Dan Schweitzer, Director and Chief Counsel
- Melissa Patterson, Supreme Court Fellow
- Amanda Schwartz, Supreme Court Fellow
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