Posted on August 1, 2013 by Irma S. Russell
Last month’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District has been the subject of intense dialogue among ACOEL membersand environmental lawyers around the country. The Court’s holding that the Water District violated the Fifth Amendment just compensation clause extended the Nollan and Dolan standard to the context of denial of a permit application and raised the need for land use agreements that achieve acceptable results for all involved – a tall order.
A recently published book provides a resource for lawyers and students working in the land use arena. Land In Conflict: Managing and Resolving Land Use Disputes (Lincoln Institute, 2013) by Sean Nolon, Ona Ferguson, and Patrick Field, focuses on land use disputes over the full range of zoning, planning, and development and provides a primer for professionals on all sides of land use issues, including local planners, proponents of projects, developers and their financiers. Parties involved in land use permitting can draw on the book to consider how their conduct and orientation facilitate (or, perhaps, impair) the ability of the parties to find common ground. This book provides insights regarding the public’s right to access to information about land use projects. Both proponents and opponents to projects will gain ideas from this book on interacting effectively, whether this is in the filing process of proposing or opposing a project before a local board or department with land use authority. The orientation of this work is to focus on reconciling the interests of all legitimate stakeholders in the hope of producing, as the authors note, more durable outcomes than typically achieved in the adjudicatory approach. This mutual-gains approach has wider application than land use. It is guided by principles that move decision making away from the impasse of rights rhetoric toward decisions that seek the best alternatives for all stakeholders.
Tags: land use, wetlands, takings, Fifth Amendment, extractions, land use regulation