As Senate Bill 50 winds its way out of committee heading for a vote in the Senate the mayor of Menlo Park, Ray Mueller, who is also an attorney provided a short history of zoning law and precedent to the Daily Post this week. I'll just trim it down to the key points here
In many ways SB50 is the history of zoning and land-use regulation come full circle and turned on its head. In 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court, in it landmark decision Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., for the first time validated a local jurisdiction's comprehensive land-use zoning controls. The case involved a village in Ohio, Euclid, developing local zoning ordinances in an attempt to prevent industrial Cleveland from growing into and subsuming Euclid and changing the character of the village. In this case, the Supreme Court upheld Euclid's zoning ordinance, finding it was not an unreasonable extension of the village's police power and did not have the character of arbitrariness, and thus was not unconstitutional. How ironic is it then, that a legislator from a big city in California drafted SB50 to use state pre-emption to forcefully impose zoning rules to push character changing density into the suburbs.
The Euclid case was the beginning of nearly a century of land-use law in the U.S. and California that was premised on the foundation that local jurisdictions were vested with the power to regulate land use within their boundaries.
For close to a century in California, when a family picked a jurisdiction in which to make the biggest financial investment in their lives, their home, it was premised on the belief that they did so in a framework of property rights vested in an expectation they would participate in a locally elected representative government that controlled the land-use destiny of that jurisdiction: from its downtown, to its parks and open space, to it schools and fire stations, to the character of the street of the home that family purchased and children played on.
Very well put, Mr. Mueller. Our own mayor, Donna Colson, was quoted in the DJ yesterday predicting that "I think we will waste a lot of money on lawyers". I agree. With the wide, ugly grasp of SB50 there should be no problem coming up with a 20-city war chest to fight this as far as needed. Would it be a waste of taxpayer money? Sure, but it would also be necessary. It's time to start that reserve fund in the budget. We will have a long memory of those politicians who attempt to jam this down our throats.
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