Opinion ID: 2609384
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Private Use

Text: Whether the test is stated as public-use or public-purpose, there is one thing about which American courts have always said that they were adamant. Eminent domain cannot be used to transfer property from one private person to another.[ [1] ]
The eminent domain provision of the Washington Constitution, Const. art. I, § 16 (amend.9), presents one of the strongest mandates against public taking for private use of any in the nation. [2] Our text expressly prohibits taking property for private use whereas the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution only disallows same by inference ([N]or shall private property be taken for public use....). History demonstrates these words of article I, section 16, were carefully chosen to strengthen our guarantee over rejected language from other state constitutions (similar to that of the Fifth Amendment), affording our residents enhanced constitutional guarantees against injustice and oppression. [3] This absolute and mandatory language is only strengthened, not diminished, by the enumeration of certain, but here inapplicable, exceptions for private ways of necessity, and for drains, flumes, or ditches on or across the lands of others for agricultural, domestic, or sanitary purposes. The text demonstrates the ratifying public recognized and incorporated these specific exceptions to the otherwise absolute constitutional prohibition as if to say there are no others. Expressio unius est exclusio alterius. [4] The context of this constitutional provision includes article I, section 29, which states, The provisions of this Constitution are mandatory, unless by express words they are declared to be otherwise, as well as section 32, which counsels, A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is essential to the security of individual right and the perpetuity of free government. [5] Such principles must be divined to guide our review if we are to keep the faith of our Fathers. Moreover within the text of the operative section itself our Framers and Ratifiers expressly rendered the question of public or private use a wholly judicial one (Whenever an attempt is made to take private property for a use alleged to be public, the question whether the contemplated use be really public shall be a judicial question, and determined as such, without regard to any legislative assertion that the use is public.... Const. art. I, § 16) (amend.9) to be independently determined without deference to legislative direction or preference. See Healy Lumber Co. v. Morris, 33 Wash. 490, 500, 74 P. 681 (1903) (unlike all but two others, our constitution mandates the court be untrammeled by any consideration due to legislative assertion or enactment.). See also William B. Stoebuck, A General Theory of Eminent Domain, 47 Wash. L.Rev. 553, 586 (1972) (this clause is responsible for Washington requirement that there be a separate hearing on public use and necessity). As held in Hogue v. Port of Seattle, 54 Wash.2d 799, 838-39, 341 P.2d 171 (1959), our constitutional prohibition against taking private property for private use is equal in significance to the great constitutional guarantee that just compensation must be paid as a condition precedent to the exercise of the government's power of eminent domain: [I]t is the duty of the courts to uphold the rights of private property owners against the inroads of public bodies who seek to acquire it for private purposes which they honestly believe to be essential for the public good. The people of this state have placed in our constitution (Art. I, § 16 (amendment 9)) two restrictions on the power of the state and its municipal subdivisions to acquire private property. Without these two restrictions, the sovereign power to take private property would literally be without limitation. One limitation is that just compensation therefor (as fixed by a jury) must first be paid to the owner, and the second limitation is that a court must determine whether the use for which the property is sought is really a public use. These two restrictions were placed in the constitution for the protection of private property, and each one is equally as important to the property owner as the other. In other words, it is just as important that the proposed use of the property be limited to what the court decides to be a really public use as it is that the property owner be given just compensation. Id. at 838, 341 P.2d 171. Certainly it is not our role today to diminish, even by a farthing, that liberty which our Forefathers have bequeathed.
While the trial court recognized the contemplated private use is obvious and incontrovertible, it nevertheless concluded this condemnation for combined private and public use is constitutionally permissible because the volumetric ratio of private use to public use is approximately 20 percent to 80 percent. Majority at 1255. Although this calculation is somewhat problematic since the 80 percent product can be achieved only by counting empty air space over a structure which is two-thirds private and one-third public, the principle enunciated by the trial court, that private property may be condemned for private use so long as not more than 50 percent of the total seizure by area or volume is for private use, finds no principled origin in our constitutional text. Rather in consequence the trial court fashioned a rule permitting private property to be constitutionally seized for private use even when the total seizure exceeds that which is publicly necessary by up to 99 percent. That this is the trial court's rule there can be no doubt since the trial court was quite emphatic in her view that without inclusion of the air space in the public use calculation, condemnation would constitutionally fail as a public taking for private use. [6] Notwithstanding, the majority of this court opts for an even more extreme proposition: if any layer of air space is necessary for public use, condemnation of everything from Hades below to the heavens above is fair game for condemnation without concern for the intended private use of nearly everything in-between. Majority at 1258 (... its footprint spans the entire property to be condemned). Therefore, from the majority's perspective, the government may condemn a 50-story office building intending only to use one floor for a legitimate public use, selling all of the remaining confiscated private property to the highest private bidder. While I think it is correct that previous case law indeed stands for the proposition that condemned property may also be put to a private use that is merely incidental to that public use, Majority at 1255 (emphasis added), before applying this maxim we must necessarily consider the meaning of the term incidental as used in those cases, and then test the result against that which the constitutional text forbids. Of course it is ultimately the constitution which we are to protect and expound. Therefore if a branch of judicial precedent should subvert it, which I do not believe this does if properly understood, we had better tear out the tree of precedent by its roots than allow it to infect the remaining orchard with its virulence. The majority cites Chandler v. City of Seattle, 80 Wash. 154, 141 P. 331 (1914) and City of Tacoma v. Nisqually Power Co., 57 Wash. 420, 107 P. 199 (1910), to support its claim of incidental private use. However the rule I would distill from these cases, and every other incidental private use case, [7] is that to be incidental the private use must usually be in like kind to the public use, or at least dependent upon the public use, and that in no case may more property be condemned to support the public and private use than would necessarily be condemned to permit the public use even if the private use were entirely eliminated. Chandler concerned the validity of bonds for construction of a steam plant and was, therefore, not an eminent domain case at all. It seems the plant produced electricity in sufficient quantity to supply and satisfy not only the public demand but also yielded a surplus of power during certain hours of minimal public demand. The surplus was therefore available for private use as an incidental by-product of the publicly operated facility. This incidental power was an intrinsic and unavoidable consequence of steam plant operation, unlike the situation we have here where the very selection of property to be condemned was structured to provide for a separate and distinct private use, with recoupment sale on top of that. Relying upon Nisqually, by analogy, the rationale advanced in Chandler explains the distinction between an incidental use which will support condemnation and a nonincidental use which will not: If, in the meantime, it permits a small mechanic to run his lathe or sharpen his tools, such a use being so insignificant and so small as compared with the necessities that must be supplied, no court would hold that such use was such a private use as to prevent the city from maintaining these proceedings. A private use incidentally included will not defeat the right to condemn for public use so long as the public use is maintained. Chandler, 80 Wash. at 159, 141 P. 331 (quoting Nisqually, 57 Wash. at 428, 107 P. 199). Chandler then articulated the different rule which applies to other situations: In that case, the incidental use was smaller than in the case at bar, but the difference is one of degree, not of principle. Where there is a commingling of two objects to the extent that both are principal objects, a different rule applies. Chandler, 80 Wash. at 159, 141 P. 331. Here a different rule does apply because objectively (as well as subjectively) the private parking use is a principal object, although arguably not the only object or even the predominate one. As set forth in Chandler, just because the incidental use was smaller is of no account as the true distinction is of principle, not degree. I would thus agree with the thrust of Justice Robert Utter's observation that incidental is not a quantum reference but rather that which is incidental to the overarching public purpose. In re City of Seattle, 96 Wash.2d 616, 643-44, 638 P.2d 549 (1981) (Utter, J., dissenting). Similarly, the private use at issue here is not incidental to the convention hall use in the sense that the private use is in any way ancillary to, the product of, or otherwise related to the public use of the exhibit hall facility above it. If we call it incidental, we call it that only because of its physical proximity to the public use and its alleged relative quantum. But that is a difference in degree, not kind, and such a definition of incidental would authorize what our constitution prohibits: condemnation of private property for private use. Moreover, here the incidental private use is used to justify condemnation of more property than is truly necessary for merely the exhibition hall use, a justification which even the majority claims to reject in theory, Majority at 1253 (the State seeks to condemn no more property than would be necessary to accomplish the purely public component of the project), but, as will be seen, embraces in practice.