Eminent Domain Report

In 2024, in what was heralded as a big win for developers in California, the U.S. Supreme Court upended decades of California precedent and held that legislatively enacted development impact fees must satisfy the “essential nexus” and “rough proportionality” tests established in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) 483 U.S. 825 and Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994) 512 U.S. 374. Sheetz v. County of El Dorado (2024) 601 U.S. 267. But the Supreme Court did not decide whether the legislatively enacted fee program at issue in Sheetz actually failed to comply with ...

On June 24, 2025, the California Court of Appeal heard argument in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado. You may recall that the California Court of Appeal previously held that legislatively enacted development impact fees are exempt from Nollan/Dolan scrutiny, consistent with what was at the time longstanding California Supreme Court precedent. In 2024, however, the U.S. Supreme Court held that legislatively imposed exactions are not exempt from the essential nexus test established in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) 483 U.S. 825 or the rough proportionality test in ...

Sea level rise is a critical issue facing public agencies and property owners throughout the United States. In California alone, this phenomenon could impact thousands of residences and businesses, dozens of wastewater treatment plants and power plants and hundreds of miles of highways, roads and railways. Last year, the California Legislature introduced a number of bills that proposed to address, or anticipate, or mitigate the impacts of sea level rise in California. Almost all of those bills, however, failed to make their way to the Governor’s desk. This year, the California ...