Remember that whopping $36.8 million inverse condemnation judgment against the City of Half Moon Bay, California by the U.S. District Court back in November 2007? Yamagiwa v. City of Half Moon Bay, No. 05-4149 VRW (Nov. 28, 2007). The city said at the time it was going to appeal, and it hired some pretty impressive guns to do so. Now, however, it appears that the city has changed its mind, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle’s story, “Half Moon Bay’s plan to avert fiscal ruin.”
In a move to save their citygovernment, Half Moon Bay officials tonight approved a settlementagreement with a developer who won a $36.8 million court judgment lastfall that threatened to leave the city in financial ruins.
The Half Moon Bay City Council signed off on an $18 millionsettlement to developer Charles “Chop” Keenan, whose trustee wanted tobuild an 83-unit subdivision on a 24-acre property that the city hadinadvertently turned into protected wetlands.
Under the agreement, which was accepted by the developer, the citycould get out of paying a cent if it can successfully get speciallegislation passed that would allow Keenan to build 129 lots on theproperty and an adjoining parcel, bypassing wetlands protection laws.
Read the complete report here. The city probably should have thought about the consequences before itturned the plaintiff’s property into undevelopable wetlands, butgovernment regulators often don’t seriously consider the possibility oflosing. The law is stacked against property owners, and government has no problem interposing all sorts of procedural hurtles in an effort to expense the property owner down (as one governmentattorney once confessed, “we’ll ‘motion’ you for a year before we everreach the merits”). Even if the government eventually loses, anymonetary judgment will be paid with O.P.M. (Other People’s Money). In this case, however, the judgment was more than three times the annual municipal budget, an amount so large it could not be ignored by the city fathers and mothers.
Read the District Court’s 167-page Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law if you want to find out the whole sordid story of what led up to the judgment.