A delay in publication of a legal notice won’t knock out a challenge to the legality of a city’s blight designation.
In Community Youth Athletic Center v. City of National City, No. D052584 (Jan. 22, 2009), the California Fourth District Court of Appeal held that the trial court abused its discretion when it dismissed a “reverse validation” complaint because notice of the complaint was not timely published.
While this decision isn’t directly about eminent domain for economicdevelopment or redevelopment, the situation that gave rise to is. The plaintiff challenged a local ordinance that declared its property (a community boxing gym that serves “at-risk” youth) and 700 other properties to be “blighted” and available for condemnation. The gym and its neighborhood are not “blighted” in the usual sense of the word, only in thesense of California’s Community Redevelopment Law, which contains adefinition of blight that is so broad that virtually any property that stands in the path of redevelopment can bedeclared blighted and condemned. In this case, the city wants to take the properties to redevelop the area with condominiums.
The gym objected to National City’s ordinance under California’s reverse validation procedure, which allows a plaintiff to challenge the legal validity of an action taken by a public agency. The statutory validation procedures require notice of the action to be published in a newspaper, but a court order allowing publication was delayed when the San Diego area wildfires closed the courthouse for a week, followed by one of the publishing newspapers changing its publication schedule which resulted in the notices not being published in time.
The trial court entered judgment on the pleadings for the city, holding that the publication deadline was jurisdictional and no good reason was shown to excuse the failure. The court of appeals reversed:
When the trial court found a lack of good cause to allow republication and dismissed the case, its decision was apparently made under an incorrect legal standard, that did not take into account the above factors set forth in Bettencourt, supra, 42 Cal.3d 270. The undisputed facts in the current record present a scenario of an understandable procedural mistake, regarding the incorrectness of an attached document, when the focus of counsel was instead upon obtaining the order authorizing the publication of the attached summons, and when unforeseen administrative problems arose such as the absence of the trial judge and the closing of the courthouse during a countywide firestorm, and the unilateral schedule change of the newspaper. Counsel for plaintiff was otherwise diligent in pursuing the claim, and although the missing three days for the response period in the summons is critically important for jurisdictional purposes, it is not the kind of error that is inexcusable neglect that would justify a denial of a good cause finding under section 863. Instead, plaintiff adequately set forth reasons why it inadvertently failed to comply with the statute, within the meaning of the good cause definition in this context. (Katz, supra, 144 Cal.App.4th at p. 1036; Arnold, supra, 11 Cal.App.3d at pp. 802-803.) Specifically, plaintiff’s attorney was seeking to comply with the applicable notice requirements, and the error in the publication date was directly attributable to the administrative difficulties he encountered in obtaining an appropriate order for publication, to afford such notice.
Slip op. at 19. Reason.tv produced a video, narrated by Drew Carey, which details the background of this Kelo-like case where, according to the report, “the local government is taking eminent domain abuse to new lows.”
More about the case here.