Supreme Court Justices Warn People Not to Take Ruling Too Far

Several U.S. Supreme Court justices cautioned people against taking their new ruling in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, California too far.

The court handed down their decision in the case, which advocates have warned could have far-reaching effects on property development, on Friday, largely siding with a California man named George Sheetz who challenged his county's traffic impact mitigation fee as unconstitutional.

Sheetz, who sought to build a single-family home in 2016, was ordered to pay a $23,420 fee. That fee is part of a program to help fund the construction of new roads, as well as the widening of already-existing ones, to help the county, comprised of areas near Lake Tahoe and Sacramento suburbs cope with a population boom.

His attorneys argued the fee is unconstitutional because it violates the "Nollan/Dolan test." Based on two prior Supreme Court cases, that test states that the Constitution's Takings Clause requires the government to show an "essential nexus" between conditions imposed on a permit and a "legitimate state interest," as well as the "rough proportionality" between the exaction and the potential impact of a proposed development.

The court was asked to rule on whether the Takings Clause distinguishes between legislative and administrative land-use permit conditions after the California Court of Appeals ruled the Nollan/Dolan test does not apply to "legislatively prescribed monetary fees."

In the Friday decision, the court unanimously ruled the clause does not distinguish between the legislative and administrative conditions.

"The Constitution's text does not limit the Takings Clause to a particular branch of government," the ruling, penned by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, reads.

However, several justices cautioned that their ruling applies only to the circumstances brought in this case, and should not be taken too far.

One of those warnings came from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote a concurring opinion alongside Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

The ruling does not "address or prohibit the common government practice of imposing permit conditions, such as impact fees, on new developments through reasonable formulas or schedules that assess the impact of classes of development rather than the impact of specific parcels of property," Kavanaugh wrote.

"I write separately to underscore that the Court has not previously decided—and today explicitly declines to decide—whether 'a permit condition imposed on a class of properties must be tailored with the same degree of specificity as a permit condition that targets a particular development,'" he wrote.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Jackson raised a similar issue in a separate concurring opinion, noting that their ruling doesn't address "whether the permit condition would be a compensable taking if imposed outside the permitting context."

"The question presented in this case did not include that antecedent question: whether the traffic impact fee would be a compensable taking if imposed outside the permitting context and therefore could trigger Nollan/Dolan scrutiny. The California Court of Appeal did not consider that question and the Court does not resolve it," they wrote.

In a statement to Newsweek, a spokesperson for El Dorado County told Newsweek officials are "pleased with the Supreme Court's decision, which answers only a narrow question on which the parties already agreed."

"It explicitly leaves open the County's other strong defenses and casts no doubt on whether local governments can continue to impose reasonable permitting conditions (including impact fees) on new development under their traditional land-use authority, as the County has done here. The County looks forward to defending its program in any further litigation," the statement reads.

Newsweek reached out to Sheetz's attorneys and El Dorado County for comment via email.