If You Followed The Right Rules And Earn A Permit, Lazy Critics Should Lose

22/ “PROPERTY RIGHTS DEFEAT INTERLOPERS WHO ARE LAZY AND WRONG”:  BLP was the owner of a 23-acre resort with 13 rental cabins on a lake in far northeast Minnesota.  It secured a conditional use permit from the St. Louis County Planning Commission to expand the resort to 24 cabins and convert it into a resort where the cabins would be owned by parties who would allow BLP to rent the cabins to other customers when the owners did not want to occupy them. 

A lawyer persuaded a group of other cabin owners on the lake (BLA) to challenge BLP’s plans after it secured the permit.

Justice Gildea joined a unanimous Supreme Court in rejecting BLA’s challenges.

The Supreme Court first rejected four of BLA’s challenges on the ground that BLA had not raised them at the zoning hearing before the Commission, in subsequent appeals, or in their petition to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court rejected BLA’s final claim that the Planning Commission should have recognized the first four complaints on its own, even though BLA had been silent on them at the zoning hearing, in subsequent appeals, and/or in their petition to the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court noted both BLA’s failure to raise these issues earlier and the violation of the “separation of powers” doctrine that would arise if it overrode the decision of an executive body without any evidence that its decision had been “unreasonable or arbitrary and capricious.”


READ THE FULL CASE DECISION: 

The Big Lake Association, Appellant, vs. Saint Louis County Planning Commission..

February 26, 2009               2009-014            

https://mn.gov/law-library-stat/archive/supct/0902/OPA062305-0226.pdf