Donald, Sommer Frates v. Yolo County

• Decision Date: 25 June 1986
• Docket Number: No. 84-2015,84-2015
• Citation: 477 U.S. 340,91 L.Ed.2d 285,106 S.Ct. 2561
• Parties: MacDONALD, SOMMER & FRATES, Appellant v. YOLO COUNTY et al
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

477 U.S. 340

106 S.Ct. 2561

91 L.Ed.2d 285

MacDONALD, SOMMER & FRATES, Appellant

v YOLO COUNTY et al.

No. 84-2015.

Argued March 26, 1986.

Decided June 25, 1986.

Rehearing Denied Sept. 3, 1986.

See 478 U.S. 1035, 107 S.Ct. 22.

Syllabus

Appellant submitted a proposal to the Yolo County Planning Commission to subdivide certain property into 159 single-family and multifamily residential lots. The Commission rejected the proposal, and the County Board of Supervisors affirmed on the grounds that the proposal failed to provide adequate public street access, sewer services, water supplies, and police protection. Appellant then filed an action in California Superior Court, alleging that appellee county and city restricted the property in question to agricultural use by denying all subdivision applications and thereby appropriated the "entire economic use" of the property for the sole purpose of providing a public, open-space buffer. Appellant sought declaratory and monetary relief. The court sustained a demurrer to the complaint, holding that appellant's factual allegations were insufficient and that monetary damages for inverse condemnation were foreclosed by Agins v. City of Tiburon, 24 Cal.3d 266, 157 Cal.Rptr. 372, 598 P.2d 25 (1979), aff'd, 447 U.S. 255, 100 S.Ct. 2138, 65 L.Ed.2d 106 (1980). The California Court of Appeal affirmed, and the California Supreme Court denied appellant's petition for hearing.

Held: Absent a final and authoritative determination by the County Planning Commission as to how it will apply the regulations at issue to the property in question, this Court cannot determine whether a "taking" has occurred or whether the county failed to provide "just compensation." Without knowing the nature and extent of permitted development, this Court cannot adjudicate the constitutionality of the regulations that purport to limit it. Pp. 348-353.

Affirmed.

STEVENS, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which BRENNAN, MARSHALL, BLACKMUN, and O'CONNOR, JJ., joined. WHITE, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which BURGER, C.J., joined and in Parts I, II, and III of which POWELL and REHNQUIST, JJ., joined, post, p. 353. REHNQUIST, J., filed a dissenting opinion in which POWELL, J., joined, post, p. 364.

Howard N. Ellman, San Francisco, Cal., for appellant.

William L. Owen, Sacramento, Cal., for appellees.

[Amicus Curiae Information from page 341-342 intentionally omitted] Justice STEVENS delivered the opinion of the Court.

The question presented is whether rejection of a subdivision proposal deprived appellant of its property without just compensation contrary to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.¹

I

This appeal is taken from a judgment sustaining a demurrer to a property owner's complaint for money damages for an alleged "taking" of its property. In 1975, appellant submitted a tentative subdivision map to the Yolo County Planning Commission. Under appellant's proposal, the subject property, at least part of which was planted with corn, would be subdivided into 159 single-family and multifamily residential lots.

The Yolo County Planning Commission rejected the subdivision plan, however, and the Board of Supervisors of the county affirmed that determination. The Board found numerous reasons why appellant's tentative subdivision map was neither "consistent with the General Plan of the County of Yolo, nor with the specific plan of the County of Yolo embodied in the Zoning Regulations for the County." App. 73. Appellant focuses our attention on four of those reasons. See id., at 45-46 (fourth amended complaint). First, the Board criticized the plan because it failed to provide for access to the proposed subdivision by a public street: the city of Davis, to which the subdivision would adjoin, refused to permit the extension of Cowell Boulevard into the development. See id., at 74. Even ignoring this obstacle, "[t]he map presented ma[de] no provision for any other means of access to the subdivision," and the Board calculated that relying on an extension of Cowell Boulevard alone would "constitut[e] a real and substantial danger to the public health in the event of fire, earthquake, flood, or other natural disaster." Id., at 77.

Second, the Board found that appellant's "Tentative Map as presented [did] not provide for sewer service by any governmental entity":

"The only means for provision of sewer services by the El Macero interceptor sewer require that the proposed subdivision anne[x] to the existing Community Services Area. Said annexation is subject to Local Agency Formation Commission jurisdiction. The Board finds that no proceedings currently are pending before LAFCO for the annexation of the proposed subdivision." Id., at 75.

Third, the Board rejected the development plan because "[t]he level of [police] protection capable of being afforded to the proposed site by the [Yolo County] Sheriff's Department is not intense enough to meet the needs of the proposed subdivision." Id., at 76. Fourth, the Board found inadequate the provision for water service for the reason that there was "no provision made in the proposed subdivision for the provision of water or maintenance of a water system for the subdivision by any governmental entity." Ibid.

After this rebuff, appellant filed the present action and, on the same day, a petition for a writ of mandate. The mandate action, which is still pending, seeks to set aside the Board's decision and to direct the Board to reconsider appellant's subdivision proposal. See id., at 32-33 (amended petition for writ of mandate). This action, in contrast, seeks declaratory and monetary relief. In it, appellant accuses appellees County of Yolo and city of Davis of "restricting the Property to an open-space agricultural use by denying all permit applications, subdivision maps, and other requests to implement any other use," id., at 46, and thereby of appropriating the "entire economic use" of appellant's property "for the sole purpose of [providing] . . . a public, open-space buffer," id., at 51. In particular, the fourth amended complaint challenges the Board's decision with respect to the adequacy of public access, sanitation services, water supplies, and fire and police protection.² Because appellees denied these services, according to the complaint, "none of the beneficial uses" allowed even for agricultural land would be suitable for appellant's property. Id., at 52. The complaint alleged, in capital letters and "without limitation by the foregoing enumeration," that "any application for a zone change, variance or other relief would be futile." Id., at 58. The complaint also alleged that appellant had "exhausted all of its administrative remedies" and that its seven causes of action were "ripe" for adjudication. Id., at 58, 59.

In response to these charges appellees demurred.³ Pointing to "its earlier Order Sustaining Demurrers and Granting Leave to Amend," the California Superior Court contended that "the property had obvious other uses than agriculture under the Yolo County Code," id., at 115, and referenced sections permitting such uses, among others, as ranch and farm dwellings and agricultural storage facilities, see Yolo County Code §§ 8-2.502, 8-2.503. The court rejected appellant's "attemp[t] to overcome that defect by alleging as conclusionary fact that each and every principal use and each and every multiple accessory use is no longer possible so that the property does have no value as zoned." App. 115. It concluded that, irrespective of the insufficiency of appellant's factual allegations, monetary damages for inverse condemnation are foreclosed by the California Supreme Court's decision in Agins v. City of Tiburon, 24 Cal.3d 266, 274-277, 157 Cal.Rptr. 372, 376-378, 598 P.2d 25, 29-31 (1979), aff'd, 447 U.S. 255, 100 S.Ct. 2138, 65 L.Ed.2d 106 (1980). App. 116, 118.⁴

The California Court of Appeal affirmed. It "accept[ed] as true all the properly pled factual allegations of the complaint," id., at 126, and did "not consider whether the complaint was barred by the failure to exhaust administrative remedies or by res judicata," id., at 125-126. But it "f[ou]nd the decision in Agins to be controlling herein," id., at 130:

"In that case the [California] Supreme Court specifically and clearly established, for policy reasons, a rule of law which precludes a landowner from recovering in inverse condemnation based upon land use regulation. We emphasize that the Court did not hold that regulation cannot amount to a taking without compensation, it simply held that in such event the remedy is not inverse condemnation. The remedy instead is an action to have the regulation set aside as unconstitutional. Plaintiff has filed a mandate action in the trial court which is currently pending. That is its proper remedy. The claim for inverse condemnation cannot be maintained." Id., at 130-131 (citation and footnote omitted).

In the alternative, the California Court of Appeal determined that appellant would not be entitled to monetary relief even if California law provided for this remedy:

"In any event, even if an inverse condemnation action were available in a land use regulation situation, we would be constrained to hold that plaintiff has failed to state a cause of action. Pared to their essence, the allegations are that plaintiff purchased property for residential development, the property is zoned for residential development, plaintiff submitted an application for approval of development of the property into 159 residential units, and, in part at the urging of the City, the County denied approval of the application. In these allegations plaintiff is not unlike the plaintiffs in Agins . . . [a case in which] both the California Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs had failed to allege facts which would establish an unconstitutional taking of private property.

"The plaintiff's...