Land use law

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In Levine v. Town of Sterling, No. 18470 (Apr. 12, 2011), the Connecticut Supreme Court held that a property owner need not show that his property was rendered worthless or that he made “capital investment” to prove that he relied on a resolution by the town’s board of selectmen that he could build more than one house on his land.

Levine involved zoning estoppel (aka equitable estoppel, permit estoppel, or, as in Connecticut, “municipal estoppel”), the claim that the government cannot apply existing land use regulations to a parcel because the owner has relied on some kind of official assurance that she could do something else. In that case, Mr. Levine owned a parcel with an existing house and wanted to build two others and convert it to a planned unit development. The board “noted that [the plaintiff] was within his rights to do so but stressed that none…

Continue Reading Connecticut: Soft Costs Sufficient To Show “Substantial Loss” For Zoning Estoppel

As we’ve mentioned here before, the City & County of Honolulu has given the green light to a new public railway, described as “a 20-mile elevated rail line that will connect West O`ahu with downtown Honolulu and Ala Moana Center. The system features electric, steel-wheel trains capable of carrying more than 300 passengers each. Trains can carry more than 8,000 passengers per hour in each direction.”

This evening, I spoke to the Waikiki Rotary about some of the legal issues that the rail project will involve, including eminent domain, environmental questions, and the relationship between the newly-created Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART), an agency within city government to oversee the project.

Here are some links on the topics I spoke about:

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Continue Reading All Aboard? Honolulu Rail Is Coming

ABA_SLG Next week (May 12 – 15, 2011), the ABA Section of State & Local Government Law is meeting in Portland, Oregon.

This is our Spring Meeting (complete agenda here), and is co-sponsored by the Urban Land Institute and the American Planning Association. In addition to the business and administrative meetings (I promise, the meeting of the Condemnation Law Committee will be brief), we’ve lined up an impressive selection of CLE programs. Topics include:

  • Green Building – This panel will discuss the issues of Green Building Ordinances, ongoing cases involving the preemption of local green building codes under federal law and other challenges and pitfalls with Green Building Ordinance initiatives.
  • Cyberbullying – This program will explore the challenges that the Internet brings to protecting students from harassment while at the same time respecting

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Continue Reading Upcoming CLE And ABA State & Local Govt Law Section Meeting (Portland)

MaheleComes the sad news that retired U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Jon J. Chinen has died. The Star-Advertiser obit noted that he served as Bankruptcy Judge and referee from 1976 to 1993 (I learned bankruptcy law from Judge Chinen, serving for a short time as a judicial extern in his chambers during law school).

There will be a private service, and in lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Judge Jon J. Chinen Fund at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii. The address is 2515 Dole St., Honolulu, HI 96822-2350.

To Hawaii land users, Judge Chinen was best known for his seminal publication The Great Mahele: Hawaii’s Land Division of 1848 (U. Haw. Press 1958), which is available on the shelf of nearly every bookstore in Hawaii (and on-line here). It is a quick but detailed summary of the pre-contact system and the Mahele…

Continue Reading Aloha, Judge Chinen

Here’s the recording of last week’s oral arguments in Comm’n on Ethics of the State of Nevada v. Carrigan, No. 10-568 (cert. granted Jan 7, 2011).

Stream the arguments below, or download the 25mb mp3 here.

The written transcript is available here. The merits and amici briefs are available here. 

We’re writing up a summary of the arguments, and we’ll post it soon.Continue Reading Oral Arguments In Ethics Case

5330213_big The ABA State & Local Government Law Section has just published a new book, Whose Drop Is It Anyway? Legal Issues Surrounding Our Nation’s Water Resources, edited by Megan Baroni. I just received my copy.

Skimming through the chapters, it looks worthy of a place on the bookshelf as a practical guide to a very wide range of issues related to water.

Here are the details:

Whose Drop Is It, Anyway? Legal Issues Surrounding Our Nation’s Water Resources, is a valuable resource and practical tool discussing the legal issues surrounding water resources and the current issues and trends that are influencing the legal regimes. Practical in use, this book can be used as a tool for developing effective water management strategies in your own jurisdictions.

As scarcity issues become more common and threats like global climate change loom with uncertainty over our water resources, water only stands to…

Continue Reading New Book On Water Law And Water Resources

Tomorrow (April 27, 2011), the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Comm’n on Ethics of the State of Nevada v. Carrigan, No. 10-568 (cert. granted Jan 7, 2011). In that case, the Court is considering whether a state statute that requires elected officials to recuse themselves from considering matters on which they appear to have conflicts of interest impermissibly infringes upon a city councilman’s First Amendment rights.

The Court will confront the issue of whether an elected official’s vote in a quasi-judicial matter is protected “speech,” and what standards courts should apply when ethics laws are challenged under the First Amendment. The Nevada Supreme Court invalidated its state’s ethics law which required a Sparks, Nevada city councilmember to recuse himself from considering an application to develop a hotel/casino because the developer’s “consultant” was a “longtime professional and personal friend” of the councilmember, and had been his campaign …

Continue Reading Oral Argument Preview: Supreme Court Reviewing Ethics Laws – Is An Elected Official’s Vote “Speech?”

Here are the final four briefs in Comm’n on Ethics of the State of Nevada v. Carrigan, No. 10-568 (cert. granted Jan 7, 2011). In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether a state statute which requires elected officials to recuse themselves from considering matters on which they appear to have conflicts of interest impermissibly infringes upon a city councilman’s First Amendment rights.

As we wrote in this month’s Zoning & Planning Law Report, this case is worth following since if the Court adopts the scrict scrutiny rationale of the Nevada Supreme Court (which invalidated Nevada’s ethics laws under the First Amendment), all similar conflict-of-interest laws could be subject to similar — and quite often “fatal” — scrutiny.

The Court will hear oral arguments next week, Wednesday, April 27, 2011.

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Continue Reading Last Briefs In SCOTUS Ethics Case: Does Elected Official With A Conflict Of Interest Have A Right To Vote Anyway?

“This is not what we normally do. We do land use, real estate, development law. Heck, I can get you zoning to be an airport if that’s what you want. But I don’t represent inmates, I don’t represent people charged with crime, I don’t represent criminals.”

                                     — Land Use attorney Joshua Safran

In most cases, the worlds of criminal law and land use law never meet. But in Crime After Crime, a documentary that is an official selection in the 2011 Sundance Film Festival (among other international festivals), two land use lawyers including our ABA State & Local Government Law Section colleague Nadia Costa (Vice-Chair of the Section’s Land Use Committee), enter a different milieu:

CRIME AFTER CRIME is the exclusive documentary film on the legal battle to free Debbie Peagler, a woman imprisoned for over a quarter century due to her connection to…

Continue Reading Land Use Lawyers, Criminal Justice, And Sundance