George Sheetz was charged more than $23,000 in fees to fund future traffic projects in El Dorodo County as a condition of obtaining a building permit for his home.
SACRAMENTO - A California appeals court has reaffirmed its position that a $23,420 traffic impact fee applied to an 1,800-square-foot home does not run afoul of the Constitution’s Takings Clause, even though the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year tightened the rules on such fees.
The court in California’s Third Appellate District filed the opinion on July 29, rejecting plaintiff George Sheetz’ arguments that El Dorado County’s imposition of the fee a decade ago violated his constitutional rights and was not proportional to the developmental impacts of building the modest manufactured home..
The Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause bars government agencies from taking private property without just compensation.
Sheetz, a former Los Angeles resident who relocated to Northern California and eventually became head of an engineering contracting company, has been represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, which won the favorable opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court in April.
At issue is whether a legislative body, such as El Dorado County’s elected supervisors, were exempt from takings rules imposed by legal precedent. In its first ruling in the case, the appeals court concluded there was a legislative exemption, but in April the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected that idea.
“... There is no basis for affording property rights less protection in the hands of legislators than administrators,” Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court in April. “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 high court vacated the first appeals court ruling and remanded it back to the court for further deliberations. But last month, the California court reaffirmed its first decision, finding that the traffic impact fees were constitutional despite the higher scrutiny advanced by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“In California, local governments have broad authority, under the grant of police power in the state Constitution, to regulate the development and use of real property within their jurisdiction to promote the public welfare, which includes the power to require landowners to pay a fee to mitigate the public impacts of their proposed development projects as a condition of approval,” the appeals court said.
Brian Hodges, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, said attorneys this week are filing a petition for a rehearing with the appeals court. If the appeals court chooses not to re-evaluate the case, a petition for review would be filed with the state Supreme Court, Hodges said
“There’s still a lot of life left to this case,” he told the Southern California Record. “... The key issue is the county made a decision to place a substantial portion of the cost to mitigate future commercial development on residential development.”
This cost shifting places an excessive burden on residential builders such as Sheetz – which the U.S. Supreme Court sought to protect against – according to Hodges. He added that traffic impact mitigation fees nationwide average about $3,500, while the average for such fees is about $6,000 in California.
“U.S. Supreme Court decisions have overruled three decades of California impact fees,” he said.
El Dorado County is an outlier in the area of impact fees, according to Hodges, and the failure of such fees to be tethered to direct impacts of individual developments makes them unconstitutional.