Riverside Land Case Is Among the First to Go to Federal Court

GlobeSt.com (September 19, 2019) A recent US Supreme Court decision could be a game changer for real estate owners. This June, in the case of Knick v. Township of Scott, the US Supreme Court decided, overturning a portion of the 1985 case Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City, landowners would not need to pursue all state venues before bringing suits to federal court. The decision allows landowners and property owners whose property has been inversely condemned to bring action against government agencies in federal court. Now, a landowner in Riverside is taking advantage of the opportunity in one of the first cases since the new ruling was made. In EHOF Lakeside II, LLC v. Riverside County Transportation Commission et al., a private property owner in Riverside is bringing an action against The County of Riverside, the Western Riverside Regional Conservation Authority and the Riverside County Transportation Commission. According to the suit, the agencies have blocked the landowner from developing the property because it falls within a conservation area, while simultaneously refusing to purchase the property. “[The agencies] realized that the endangered species that populated parts of the County were going to get in the way of infrastructure projects. So in the 1990s, they decided that instead of doing individual mitigation on every project, which was adding three-to-five years to every transportation project and preventing some of them from going forward, they decided to do a multiple species habitat conservation plan,” Rick Friess, an attorney at Allen Matkins who is representing the private property owner in the case, tells GlobeSt.com. “That was a 153,000-acre plan to conserve the species broadly. It was a good planning concept. In the implementation, they made unrealistic predictions about funding sources and how well they would handle the development processes. To move forward, Riverside County created the regional conservation authority as a joint powers authority to do the actual implementation of this plan.” Read More (subscription required)