Posted on 10/13/2012 8:42:56 PM PDT by WilliamIII
You’re the owner of a piece of commercial property, and local regulators are asking you to make sure the impact of work you’d like to do is mitigated: wetlands accommodated, the property fixed up and cleaned up.
So no problem.
Then regulators tell you they also are going to require that you – at an expense estimated up to $150,000 – fix up and clean up a piece of unrelated government property miles away from your project.
Or else.
What do you do?
That’s the question that will be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a dispute out of Florida that is being handled by the Pacific Legal Foundation.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
I'd claim the government property as my own since I was required to improve upon it.
This crap has been going on for over 30 years, early on it was called “linkage fees”, and several other b.s. terms where local governments shake down developers or redevelopers to pay for other public pet projects that have nothing to do with what the owner is attempting to do with his property. Development is risky enough based on market risk, but of course government parasites think the private sector has nothing better to do, given they are rich, profit hungry pigs, than to add additional indirect costs to their projects. This goes on everywhere, but it is a matter of degree. I hope this person is able to win at the Supreme Court level and curtail this theft, blackmail, shakedown of honest citizens trying to make the world a better place and add some profit (the original motivator) to their risky endeavors. Sad. Even worse, a travesty, in what was once a free country for entrepreneurs.
Sooo—IF the developer of this property gets bamboozled into this scam, are the costs of cleaning up the other property added to his ‘BASIS’ for his own property to be applied when it is sold in the future????
interesting question !
This seems to be pretty similar to Dolan v. City of Tigard. I’m not sure why this case even had to get to this point in light of the court’s decision in Dolan.
If you follow the money, it might be interesting to see if any of the “regulators” own land near the “government” property.
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