Citizens v Mount Vernon :: 133 Wn2d 861
Category: Land Use and Property Rights
The Supreme Court has now reversed the long held doctrine of exhaustion of administrative remedies. The writer of the majority opinion spent most an entire page explaining why this doctrine was so important. [at 866]. This is the rule that demands a “party must generally exhaust all available administrative remedies prior to seeking relief in superior court.” [at 866]. The majority denied the property owners their right to develop their land stating that the citizen group opposed to the construction had standing to bring this case to court because it had exhausted its administrative remedies and thus the Court resolved the issue in favor of zoning regulations. [at 876-77]. However, as Justice Sanders pointed out in his dissent, the issue of zoning was never raised at the administrative level.
If the issue of zoning had been raised from the beginning, the city would have been able to resolve the matter timely. The property was an island of county property, zoned commercial, surrounded by city property, zoned residential. Within the city’s comprehensive zoning plan, they had allowed for a commercial development area within the single family zoning to facilitate local commerce. Haggen Inc, et al, owned the property and proposed to annex it into the City of Mount Vernon. The city admitted from the start, as both the trial court and the Supreme Court affirmed, that the annexation was “project driven.” In fact, the zoning, the master plan, the commercial PUD (planned unit development) and the annexation were voted into the city by the council on the same day. Every step was taken by the proponents and the city to conform the commercial development to the city ordinances prior to annexation.
The issue before the Court was zoning and the fact of the matter is that the citizen group never raised an objection to zoning before the city council nor the planning commission. With this new precedent, we now have discriminatory enforcement of a long held rule and another property owner is denied the highest economic use of their land.
Rating the Usual Suspects:
| pass | Buck, Peter | |
| pass | Foster III, William | |
| pass | Guy, Richard | |
| pass | Madsen, Barbara | |
| pass | Moser, C Thomas | |
| pass | Oldham, Kitteridge | |
| pass | Sanders, Richard | |
| pass | Smith, Linford | |
| fail | Alexander, Gerry | |
| fail | Aramburu, J Richard | |
| fail | Bruhn, Stanley | |
| fail | Dolliver, James | |
| fail | Durham, Barbara | |
| fail | Eustis, Jeffrey M | |
| fail | Johnson, Charles | |
| fail | Smith, Charles | |
| fail | Talmadge, Phil |