Landowner files suit over moratorium extension
Posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008
Comments by Greenland Mayor John Gray have spurred a lawsuit against the city.
According to a court brief, Greenland Properties, which owns a parcel at Wilson Street and Lillie Lane near Interstate 540, is suing the city on claims that the Greenland City Council "improperly extended a development moratorium for 90 days "on April 14 and prevented the company from selling its land to Love's Travel Shops & Country Stores for a truck stop.
The document stated that at the meeting Gray, in describing his desire to prevent Love's from coming in, called the company a "big box category killer"and said the city needed to do something to protect a locally owned truck stop, Tobo's, owned by Todd Bohannon, near the proposed Love's loca- tion.
In a letter he read to the council, Gray said," I am willing to fight to save Todd Bohannon's business.... People like Mr. Bohannon deserve to sleep well at night without fear that some mega-corporation is going to come along and wipe him out. We need to write rules to protect folks like these from predators... and we want our money circulated locally, not sucked out of the economy and sent to some far-off corporate headquarters."
Stephen R. Giles, the attorney representing Greenland Properties, said Gray's comments represented an improper reason to extend a temporary commercial moratorium the council originally approved in August.
"It's obvious from the meeting that the mayor was trying to keep (Love's ) from opening to protect (Tobo's )," Giles said.
Alderman Bill Groom defended the city by saying Gray prefaced his comments with a disclaimer that they were a matter of personal opinion and not the governing body's stance.
Before the council renewed the moratorium, both Groom and Alderman Lisa Thornton said they favored the extension because more progress was needed on overhauling the city's master land use and street plans - not because of Gray's comments.
Groom added that he just wants to see the plans successfully completed so the city can start becoming a destination and not a drivethrough community.
"I don't have a categorical objection to (Love's )," he said. "I just don't want us to be Exit 58 where people stop and get gas. We've got a whole lot more potential."
Groom said the council and Planning Commission are gathering public input and putting together its new plans, and if Love's still wants to go in when it's all done, the people will have a say in its fate. He said it's not up to the mayor.
"If the public said they want (Love's ) up there then we'll look into it," he said.
He added that he's not too happy the landowner sued, which he called a rash decision.
"It's a shotgun approach, and it's going to backfire on them," he said. "We're getting close to the point where we're getting this process done."
Giles said he hopes to convince the court that 11 months is too long for a developmental moratorium and that it's depriving his client of the right to sell or develop its land.
Moratoriums are hard to compare because they are so rare, said Jeff Hawkins, executive director of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission. He directed to Northwest Arkansas Times to a U. S. Supreme Court case in which a judge held that even a three-year moratorium is not unreasonable.
According to the Cornell University Law School Web site, in the case of Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the judge stated that even though home and property owners were affected by the 32-month moratorium, it did not constitute as a taking of land, meaning it did not deprive them of private, real or personal property without compensation.
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