Government regulators of housing and development near South Lake Tahoe have reversed a ruling that prevented a couple from replacing a house on their land that was destroyed in a forest fire.
Teresa Avila-Burns and Ray Burns bought the property in foreclosure in 2009, two years after the house burned down. Their intent was to build a new home on the property for their elderly mothers.
But the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency ruled that the couple could not put a home on the same footprint because officials were worried about contaminating the water of Lake Tahoe, which is some five miles away.
Now the governmental agency has reversed itself, according to the Pacific Legal Foundation, which brought a case on behalf of the couple.
PLF had argued in a complaint that the TRPA was violating the Fifth Amendment by refusing to allow the home to be rebuilt after the couple bought the property out of foreclosure for that very purpose.
“As our lawsuit argued, TRPA was engaged in a clear-cut, unconstitutional taking,” said PLF staff attorney Christopher Kieser. “Because of the strength of our Fifth Amendment claim, TRPA started to backtrack soon after we filed our lawsuit.”
The Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from taking private property without paying for it. In this case, the agency was preventing the couple from using their land.
TRPA eventually proposed a settlement that will allow the couple to build a house on the property near the place where the original house stood, PLF said.
“Before turning to PLF for help, Ray and Teresa had wrangled with the regulators for years,” Kieser said. “Now, faced with being hauled before a court, TRPA is finally recognizing this couple’s fundamental rights, so they can finally move ahead with their dream to build a Lake Tahoe home for their elderly mothers.”
Even though the site, inside a developed residential area, had a home until the 2007 fire, the TRPA abruptly ruled that the parcel the Burns had purchased was entirely inside a “Stream Environment Zone” and so no building permit could be issued for the site.
The Pacific Legal Foundation argued in court that there are ways for government to take private property for essential government functions, but if the Burns case applied, the government was constitutionally required to pay fair compensation.
In their settlement offer, the building regulators agreed that the Burns could use 3,100 square feet of their land for development, including a house with a footprint of 2,435 square feet.
That gives the couple “enough room to build a house near the same place on the property that the previous home had stood,” PLF said.
“This settlement is an enormous win for us and for the rights of all property owners,” Teresa Avila-Burns said in a statement released by PLF. “Ray and I really did have all of our property rights taken away by the regulators, and there was no chance our rights would be restored if PLF had not gone to bat for us.”
WND reported when the case was filed that the regional agency had banned building on the property only after the couple had bought the land out of foreclosure in 2009.
They had been told by several regulators they could build and spent $1,400 on a building “right,” one of several that was allocated under a program to control building projects.
Then the agency said it would not allow them to build and would not compensate them for restricting the use of their land.
The case highlighted the problem with the government agency’s designation of the land as a “Stream Environment Zone.” The parcel is located about 5.3 miles from Lake Tahoe. Between the parcel and the lake lies the city of South Lake Tahoe, with substantial urban commercial and residential development.
The couple’s lawyers noted the parcel not only is inside a developed subdivision, it is “on a major paved street, with concrete curbs, and a driveway curb cut into the property.”
“It has electrical service, public water, public sewer, and telephone services. Most surrounding parcels are developed with existing single-family homes.”
Teresa, a nurse, and Ray, a construction project manager, long had vacationed in the area and had dreamed a buying land there. Their opportunity came in 2009 when the land came available under a foreclosure process that followed the wildfire.
They hired a designer, bought a housing allocation from El Dorado County, as TRPA instructed, and were making construction plans.
Then the TRPA suddenly determined the land was in the stream zone, and no building would be allowed.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/04/30/tahoe-backtracks-allows-owners-to-replace-destroyed-house/
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