Appeals Court Upholds Building Ban in Tahoe Basin

Ruling in a long-running legal battle over development restrictions in the Lake Tahoe Basin, a federal appeals court Thursday upheld the ability of government agencies to adopt temporary construction bans.

The case was viewed as a serious threat to building moratoriums, prompting the U.S. Department of Justice and several Western states to file briefs in support of the government’s right to temporarily halt development while drawing up permanent planning regulations.

“It was an extremely important decision,” said Dan Siegel, supervising deputy in the California attorney general’s office.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco was issued in a lawsuit filed in 1984 by a group representing 450 Lake Tahoe landowners.

The property owners argued that in adopting a three-year building moratorium in the early 1980s, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency had deprived them of the use of their land, violating their constitutional rights.

The appeals panel disagreed, overturning a district court ruling and eliciting sighs of relief from land use planners.

“The widespread invalidation of temporary planning moratoria would deprive state and local governments of an important land use planning tool with a well-established tradition,” the ruling said.

Written by Justice Stephen Reinhardt, the decision noted that “temporary development moratoria prevent developers and landowners from racing to carry out development that is destructive of the community’s interests before a new plan goes into effect.”

Lawrence L. Hoffman, the attorney for the homeowners group, was not available for comment. His assistant said the group probably will appeal the decision to the full 9th Circuit panel and, if necessary, may ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case.

The issue of development around Lake Tahoe has been highly contentious.

The planning agency was created in 1969 by California and Nevada to control pollution that is robbing the lake of its famed clarity. In 1987 the agency adopted permanent land use rules. They too are being challenged in federal court by members of the landowners’ group, the Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council.

Siegel predicted that Thursday’s ruling would help the state in the pending suit. John Marshall, acting executive director of the regional agency, called Thursday’s decision a “complete victory” in the 1984 case.

The appeals panel rejected a Nevada district judge’s finding that the planning agency had essentially taken private property by imposing the construction ban from 1981 to 1984 and therefore owed the landowners compensation.

“While the temporary moratorium surely had a negative impact on property values in the basin, we cannot conclude that the interim suspension of development wiped out the value of the plaintiffs’ properties,” the panel wrote.