Landowner stands ground against government 'shake-down'

Supremes agree to decide how much regulators can require

by Bob Unruh Email | Archive

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.

In the case, the owner of a piece of commercial property in Orange County, Fla., the Koontz family, was told that to get the permits necessary to use their land, they would have to spend thousands of his dollars making improvements to government-owned land miles away – just because that’s what officials decided they wanted.  To Read More....