Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency
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Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, 535 U.S. 302
Case citation
Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported...

 (2002), is one of the United States Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...

's more recent interpretations of the Takings Clause of the Fifth
Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, protects against abuse of government authority in a legal procedure. Its guarantees stem from English common law which traces back to the Magna Carta in 1215...

 and Fourteenth
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...

 Amendments.
The case dealt with the question of whether a moratorium
Moratorium (law)
A moratorium is a delay or suspension of an activity or a law. In a legal context, it may refer to the temporary suspension of a law to allow a legal challenge to be carried out....

 on construction of individual homes imposed by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency
Tahoe Regional Planning Agency
The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency was formed in 1969 through a bi-state compact between California and Nevada which was ratified by the U.S. Congress...

 fell under the Takings Clause of the United States Constitution
United States Constitution
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens, and all people within the United States.The first three...

 and whether the landowners therefore should receive just compensation as required by that clause. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency was represented by future Chief Justice John Roberts
John Roberts
John Glover Roberts, Jr. is the 17th and current Chief Justice of the United States. He has served since 2005, having been nominated by President George W. Bush after the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist...

.
Justice John Paul Stevens
John Paul Stevens
John Paul Stevens served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from December 19, 1975 until his retirement on June 29, 2010. At the time of his retirement, he was the oldest member of the Court and the third-longest serving justice in the Court's history...

 wrote the opinion of the Court, finding that the moratorium
Moratorium (law)
A moratorium is a delay or suspension of an activity or a law. In a legal context, it may refer to the temporary suspension of a law to allow a legal challenge to be carried out....

 did not constitute a taking. It reasoned that there was an inherent difference between the acquisition of property
Property
Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...

 for public use and the regulation of property from private use. The majority concluded that the moratorium at issue in this case should be classified as a regulation of property from private use and therefore no compensation was required.

Facts of the case

Lake Tahoe
Lake Tahoe
Lake Tahoe is a large freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada of the United States. At a surface elevation of , it is located along the border between California and Nevada, west of Carson City. Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America. Its depth is , making it the USA's second-deepest...

 Basin falls within both California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 and Nevada
Nevada
Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...

. Those two states created the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency
Tahoe Regional Planning Agency
The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency was formed in 1969 through a bi-state compact between California and Nevada which was ratified by the U.S. Congress...

 (TRPA) to plan the development of the basin. Between 1981-1984 the TRPA issued two moratoriums on virtually all residential development within the basin. The first moratorium lasted roughly 24 months and the second lasted about 8 months until the TRPA had adopted its comprehensive land-use plan. The plaintiff
Plaintiff
A plaintiff , also known as a claimant or complainant, is the term used in some jurisdictions for the party who initiates a lawsuit before a court...

s in the case were a group of persons who owned individual home sites within the jurisdiction of the TRPA and were therefore subject to the moratoria. The plaintiffs were challenging the law on the grounds that by denying the use of their land, the moratoria issued by the TRPA were in fact takings as described by the Takings Clause of the US Constitution in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and that therefore they should receive just compensation.

Procedural history

The District Court found that:

(1) Even though the land retained some value during the period of the moratoria the landowners were, for a time, completely deprived of any economic use of their land.

(2) Therefore the two moratoria did in fact constitute a taking as described by the [Takings Clause] Takings Clause#Eminent domain of the U.S. Constitution.

The case was appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is a U.S. federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts:* District of Alaska* District of Arizona...

. The Circuit Court found that since the moratoria had only temporary impact on the landowners property no taking occurred and no compensation was required.

Issue before the Court

Whether a moratorium on development imposed during the process of devising a comprehensive land-use plan constitutes a per se taking of property requiring compensation.

Majority opinion

The majority opinion written by Justice Stevens dealt with several issues that were raised by the petitioners seeking compensation.

First Justice Stevens discarded the petitioners’ assertion that the enactment of the moratorium deprived the plaintiffs of all economic use of the property and therefore required compensation.

Justice Stevens held the case law does not support and in fact rejects the idea that a temporary moratorium invokes the Just Compensation clause. The text of the Fifth Amendment itself, he argued, creates a distinction between physical takings and regulatory takings specifying that only physical takings of private property for public purposes require just compensation. Justice Stevens closed this section of his argument predicting that if all takings, physical and regulatory, were to require just compensation then the whole notion of government takings would be, “a luxury few governments could afford”. Majority Opinion at FindLaw.com

Next Justice Stevens dealt with petitioners urging to examine the Court’s case law dealing with regulatory takings especially Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council
Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council
Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003 , was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States established the "total takings" test for evaluating whether a particular regulatory action constitutes a regulatory taking that requires compensation.-Parties:Plaintiff/Petitioner :...

(1992). Stevens however dismissed the precedent of Lucas saying that logically the property at issue in the present case cannot be considered to have lost all economic value since as soon as the moratorium is lifted it will recover all economic value. Fluctuations in property value cannot be considered constitutional takings.

Lastly Justice Stevens moved on to more functional concerns. If governments are required to compensate landowners every time a moratorium is put into place in order to plan the development of an area, then officials will either rush through the planning process or skip it altogether fostering growth in the community that is either ill-conceived or inefficient.

See also


External links

Full Text of Official Opinion on FindLaw.com
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