Church lands Feds' backing in seizure suit

Will Astor//June 9, 2006//

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In a move that could shine a national spotlight on a local legal dispute, the U.S. Justice Department has weighed in on the side of a Brighton church in a dispute over the town’s attempt to seize church-owned land for a public park.
Faith Temple Church is seeking reversal by a U.S. Second Circuit panel of a Dec. 15 ruling by U.S. District Judge David Larimer dismissing the church’s complaint against the town.
In a recently submitted amicus curiae, or friend of the court, brief, U.S. Justice Department attorneys joined the church in urging reversal, echoing Faith Temple arguments that a land seizure by the town would violate a 2000 federal law barring municipal land-use rules that impinge on religious organizations’ freedom to worship.
A reversal would send the case back to District Court for a full hearing.
If the Second Circuit panel upholds the lower-court ruling, Faith Temple would be prepared to take the case further, seeking a U.S. Supreme Court hearing, the church’s attorney, David Cook of Nixon Peabody LLP, said.
The town’s lawyer, William Bauer of Woods Oviatt Gilman LLP, declined to speculate on future developments in the case. The town expects the Second Circuit to uphold the lower-court ruling, Bauer said, noting Brighton also has won favorable decisions in a parallel state court hearing of the dispute from a state Supreme Court justice and a Fourth Department Appellate Division panel.
The local eminent domain case calls to mind a recent Supreme Court ruling in a highly publicized Connecticut eminent domain dispute last year. In the Connecticut case, the high court drew barbs for a ruling that let the city of New London condemn property, which it turned over to a private developer.
Different issues are involved in the local and Connecticut cases, Cook said. While the Connecticut case centered on the intersection of municipal power, perceived public good and private-property rights, the Brighton dispute is about religious liberty.
Faith Temple Church-a 1,200-member Evangelical church with ambitious expansion plans-sued the town and Brighton officials in 2004 to stave off the town’s eminent domain seizure of a 66-acre parcel on Westfall Road.
Faith Temple hopes to put up a church large enough to accommodate its entire membership at one sitting and other buildings, including a school for aspiring pastors, on the land. The parcel, which the church acquired last year, previously was owned by a private party who had turned down the town’s offer to buy the land. The town’s eminent domain proceeding and the church’s building plans are on hold pending the court case’s outcome.
The land sits on several hundred acres of largely undeveloped land in Brighton whose future has been hotly debated for more than two decades.
Packed public hearings in the 1980s saw environmentalists, developers and land owners square off in debates over whether development on what was then farmland where cattle still grazed should be allowed at all or whether the land should be set aside as green space.
A series of compromises led to the town allowing several adjacent tracts totaling some 400 acres to be commercially developed and for smaller portions to be set aside for public parkland.
When it started looking at the 66-acre tract, Faith Temple had long outgrown its quarters on Elmwood Avenue not far from the Brighton Town Hall, Cook said. Locating out of Brighton, where Faith Temple had been situated for some 80 years, was out of the question. That left few other options in a town where other developable parcels big enough to build the campus the church envisioned were virtually non-existent.
Faith Temple acquired the Westfall Road parcel last year but had been negotiating with the land’s previous owner, Allen Groos, since 2003, Cook said. Previously, the town had offered to buy the land from Groos, who turned down the bid as too low, Cook added.
Church officials, who were aware of the town’s commitment to develop parkland in the area, met with town officials and worked out what they thought was a compromise in which the town and the church agreed that Faith Temple could build on the Groos parcel and the town would put its park elsewhere, Cook said. And when the town started eminent domain proceedings, he said, the church was blindsided.
The town has maintained in its court filings that its officials were only vaguely aware, at best, of the church’s intentions.
In the December ruling, Larimer described the extent to which town officials were aware of Faith Temple’s intentions as “unclear.”
What the town might or might not have known is not the key issue in the case, however, Cook conceded.
“It’s really a very narrow issue,” he said.
The question that matters now is whether the town’s seizure of church-owned land violates the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.
The act is a dual purpose law passed by Congress in 2000. It seeks to limit municipalities’ ability to squelch religious organizations’ building projects and protect prisoners against jailers’ attempts to unreasonably curtail or prevent religious practices.
The law on one hand bars municipalities from imposing land-use restrictions that unduly “impose a substantial burden” on the religious practices of churches and other religious organizations. But it also allows such restrictions if municipalities can prove compelling governmental interest and show that the restrictions they impose are “the least restrictive means” of achieving that interest.
The town’s position, which Larimer agreed with in the December ruling, is that RLUIPA does not come into play because eminent domain seizures and land-use regulations are not the same thing.
Zoning rules or landmark status designation constitute land-use regulation and Brighton’s condemnation of the Groos parcel was neither a zoning nor a landmarking issue, Larimer wrote in the December ruling.
Justice Department lawyers David
Flynn and Dirk Phillips in the department’s friend of the court brief maintained that Larimer erred by failing to take into account that prior to considering an eminent domain seizure the town included plans to use the Groos tract for parkland in a comprehensive plan. That plan in essence is land-use regulation, which makes the town’s attempt to condemn the land squarely under the federal law, the Justice Department maintains.
Brighton’s attorney Bauer called that contention “a stretch.” Larimer considered that argument and properly rejected it, he said.
The Brighton case could have wider ramifications, said Harris Beach LLP partner Vincent Buzard, the head of Harris Beach’s appeals practice group.
Unlike the recent Connecticut ruling, which agreed with earlier New York Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court rulings, the Faith Temple case would be the first definitive statement on the question of whether RLIUPA covers eminent domain seizures of church-owned land, Buzard said.
A Second Circuit decision would not establish a nationwide precedent on the question but “would be a pretty good start,” Buzard said.
If the town prevails in the case, Cook said, its victory could be Pyrrhic-one won at an excessive cost. Having already spent a considerable sum to press its eminent domain case, the town would-under eminent domain rules-have to pay for the 66-acre parcel at fair market prices, which Cook believes, could mean a nearly $5 million price tag.
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