Opinion ID: 1832483
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: the district court properly excluded evidence of l.b. 552

Text: The appellants offered into evidence L.B. 552, which the District introduced to the Nebraska Legislature in 2005. L.B. 552 would have allowed an NRD encompassing a metropolitan class city to enter into cost-sharing agreements with landowners, developers, and other cooperators in connection with ... dam and reservoir projects. (Emphasis supplied.) The Legislature did not pass the bill. The district court excluded the evidence as irrelevant. The appellants argue that L.B. 552 was relevant as an admission by the District that it lacks authority to enter into the Agreement with the private developers. Appellee SLD argues, however, The only fact LB 552 may have made more probable was that [the District] was concerned that a court may not interpret the Nebraska statutes as expressly granting [the District] authority to enter into agreements with developers. [9] In proceedings where the Nebraska Evidence Rules apply, the rules control the admissibility of evidence; judicial discretion is involved only when the rules make discretion a factor in determining admissibility. [10] When the Nebraska Evidence Rules commit the evidentiary question at issue to the discretion of the trial court, we review the admissibility of evidence for an abuse of discretion. [11] Because the exercise of judicial discretion is implicit in determinations of relevancy, we will not reverse the trial court's decision absent an abuse of discretion. [12] An abuse of discretion occurs when the trial judge's reasons or rulings are clearly untenable, unfairly depriving a litigant of a substantial right and denying just results in matters submitted for disposition. [13] Under Nebraska law, relevant evidence means evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence. [14] Evidence which is not relevant is inadmissible. [15] Whether the District believed, or even questioned, that it lacked authority to enter agreements with private developers is not relevant to whether it had such authority under current Nebraska law. The district court did not abuse its discretion in excluding L.B. 552.