Opinion ID: 1188002
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Standing as statutory law.

Text: We begin by noting what is and what is not presented by the appeal. Friends of Benton County petitioned and LUBA allowed it to appear in a representational capacity on the basis that one of its members, Clif Kenagy, is a landowner who had appeared in the county's proceeding and who would be aggrieved or adversely affected by the county's decision. The county resisted the petition on the ground that Mr. Kenagy did not have a sufficient interest to qualify as a petitioner before LUBA. It did not question that the organization would qualify if he did. The county made the same concession in the Court of Appeals and in this court. The Court of Appeals accepted this assumption on the strength of its decision in 1000 Friends of Oregon v. Multnomah County, 39 Or. App. 917, 593 P.2d 1171 (1979). This court has not examined or approved the concept of representational standing. If we were to do so, a number of questions would have to be briefed and considered. [1] They were not made an issue in this case, and we do not decide them. We mention only that this issue and the issue of the individual rights of the member from which Friends of Benton County derives its standing before LUBA both illustrate a common problem in judicial review of governmental action. The problem arises from the inveterate practice of seeking and citing statements of rules in judicial opinions, even when the rules have their sources not in common law but in statutes that differ from one agency to another, from one form of judicial review to another, and often from one legislative session to the next. This is notably true of standing. Standing is not common law. Some statutes expressly provide who may seek review of specific governmental actions. Other statutes prescribe more generally who may invoke one or another form of relief against various governmental actions. The statutory criteria are by no means uniform or consistent. Nevertheless, a decision accepting or declining review to a party in a certain position often is said to hold that such a party has standing, and this proposition thereafter is cited for or against such standing to obtain relief under different statutes. Also, because the literature of administrative law deals largely with federal law, much standing doctrine is argued and adopted from federal decisions, although these often focus on the case or controversy requirement of federal jurisdiction under Article III of the United States Constitution. The fragmentation and perhaps needless complexity of Oregon's statutes on judicial review appear in recent decisions in which we have had to examine standing to seek review under the administrative procedure act, under the declaratory judgment act, by writ of review, by writ of mandamus, and under other statutes. Marbet v. Portland General Electric, supra n. 1, held that a person who had been admitted as a party to a contested case under the administrative procedure act was entitled by the terms of that act to pursue judicial review without further proof of injury. We noted that [n]either the issue of standing under the administrative procedure act nor the issue of intervention under the energy facility siting act depends on generalizations of administrative law. Both issues have been resolved by the legislature. 277 Or. at 453, 561 P.2d 154. In Gruber v. Lincoln Hospital District, 285 Or. 3, 588 P.2d 1281 (1979), a person seeking to invalidate acts of the district as a resident and taxpayer was barred because his complaint failed to show the impact of the challenged acts on his rights, status, or other legal relations required by the declaratory judgment act, ORS 28.020. Such a showing, however, sometimes has not been required when a writ of mandamus is sought to enforce a public right [2] on the relation of a party beneficially interested. ORS 34.130. In Strawberry Hill 4-Wheelers v. Board of Comm'rs for County of Benton, 287 Or. 591, 601 P.2d 769 (1979), we reviewed the century-old conundrum of challenges to the conduct of county business by a writ of review expressly limited to judicial or quasi-judicial functions exercised to the injury of some substantial right of the plaintiff, and not otherwise. Former ORS 203.200; former ORS 34.040. There we wrote: References to `standing,' without more, risk treating this term as a generic concept whose contours may be drawn indiscriminately from decisions interpreting diverse statutes or U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, or from the academic literature. But statutes often provide differentiated requirements for `standing' before an agency or to obtain different judicial remedies. 287 Or. at 609 n. 8, 601 P.2d 769. And we repeated an observation made in Gruber, supra, that courts can do little to formulate coherent rules of standing or other aspects of judicial review in the absence of a systematic statutory framework. Id. at 608 n. 7, 601 P.2d 769. In this case, the Court of Appeals rested respondents' representational standing on its earlier decision in 1000 Friends of Oregon v. Multnomah County, 39 Or. App. 917, 593 P.2d 1171 (1979). That decision, in turn, cited cases in the Supreme Court of the United States without explaining how those cases, or the laws under which they were decided, related to the jurisdictional basis of the case before the Court of Appeals. Moreover, the present case comes to court under different statutory provisions for review from those in 1000 Friends of Oregon v. Multnomah County or in two other cases also cited by the Court of Appeals. [3] These provisions were extensively considered and revised when the Land Use Board of Appeals was created in 1979. Therefore, insofar as Friends of Benton County made no effort to claim standing before LUBA except as a representative of its member Kenagy, the latter's qualification as a petitioner before LUBA must be examined under the 1979 law.