The state Supreme Court issued an opinion last week in a seven-year-old dispute involving Summit County, and a South Summit woman who owns hundreds of acres of land in the Snyderville Basin.
Because of illegal zoning ordinances enacted on the West Side of Summit County in the late 1990s, Nadine Gillmor said she was unable to sell her property to real estate investors.
Gillmor has claimed that more than a dozen developers have inquired about purchasing her land but they have backed away because the builders knew it would be difficult to obtain development approvals.
Gillmor sued Summit County about five years ago challenging the Snyderville Basin General Plan and Development Code that were enacted in the late 1990s. She sued after county officials denied her application to construct a subdivision in Silver Summit that would have contained several hundred homes. But a 3rd District Court judge ruled against Gillmor in 2007.
The lawsuit was filed too late, according to the judge. The judge sided with county officials in ruling that before Gillmor filed her claims the time period for her to protest the 1998 development code had expired.
Gillmor appealed to the Utah Supreme Court saying her claims were not time barred. The state Supreme Court issued an opinion in the case Dec. 28, 2010, deciding 5-0 that the judge erred and remanding the lawsuit back to the lower court.
“For the last decade and a half Summit County’s zoning codes have been illegal and unconstitutional. They have been designed to not give landowners predictable development rights without the county getting improper goodies out of it,” said Bruce Baird, an attorney who represents Gillmor. “The [Supreme Court] simply reinstated the lawsuit. We can now claim that the old 1998 code was unintelligible and unconstitutional.”
The zoning rules in question required developers to provide free community benefits like open space and trails before increasing the size of their projects.
“The county’s position was that we had to challenge this 1998 code when it was passed, as opposed to as part of the denial of our application. The Supreme Court said that’s not correct,” Baird explained. “It’s important in two ways. One, it gives us a remedy to challenge the decades-long unfair treatment of [Gillmor] and her property. Two, one would hope that the county would at some point adopt a zoning ordinance that is not unconstitutional.”
In light of the opinion from the Supreme Court, Baird said he and Gillmor are still considering their next move.
“Our argument was all along that the county’s codes were so illegal, so unconstitutional, as to effectively not exist. The law in Utah is that if there is no effective zoning then the private property owner has a right to do essentially whatever they want to on their property,” Baird said. “Maybe we will talk with the county about whether there is any sort of reasonable compromise here We’re going to just press forward and try to get [Gillmor] some reasonable development rights on her property that for some reason the county thinks it can use as free open space.”
The ruling from the Supreme Court came as Summit County was defending itself against other lawsuits filed against the government.
“Justices have their opinions and I certainly honor that opinion,” Summit County Attorney David Brickey said Monday. “They’ve handed down the law and we’ll follow it.”
Summit County Councilman John Hanrahan said he had not had a chance to read the entire 15-page opinion.
“I think it really just puts [Gillmor] back to square one,” Hanrahan said Monday.