Court Opinion

ID: 9536114
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 06:55:07.381316+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:33:27.561708
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Groves
specially concurring:
I do not regard the matter of whether or not Mrs. Troiano anticipated the use represented by 1-70 as a factor to be considered here. I realize that there is authority to support consideration of this factor, but to me it should have cognizance, if at all, only with respect to amount of damages and not relative to the right to damages. I concur with all other portions of the opinion and in its result.
ON PETITION FOR REHEARING
On Petition for Rehearing, Mr. Justice Pringle dissents:
On Petition for Rehearing, I now dissent.
Since I stand alone on the Court in this dissent, I shall state my position most succintly. In my view, the placing of a veritable jungle of steel and concrete in the street which constituted the access to the motel property just as surely constituted a “taking” within the meaning of the Colorado and United States Constitutions as if the state had physically detached two or three feet from the front of the Troiano property for highway purposes.
I think that until the majority opinion was announced that was also the position of our decisions. See Minnequa *503Lumber Co. v. City and County of Denver, 67 Colo. 472, 186 P. 539; Denver Union Terminal Ry. v. Glodt, 67 Colo. 115, 186 P. 904; City of Pueblo v. Strait, 20 Colo. 13, 36 P. 789.
Long before there were federal and state constitutional guarantees against taking private property for public use without just compensation, that wise legal philosopher Grotius spoke as follows:
“A king may two ways deprive his subjects of their right, either by way of punishment or by virtue of the eminent power. But if he does it the last way, it must be for some public advantage, and then the subject out to receive, if possible, a just satisfaction for the loss he suffers, out of the common stock.” De Jure Belli et Pads (1625). Bk. II, cK. XIV, § VII.
In this day, when the trend is to apply humane and enlightened expression to the law so as to provide, for instance, that loss to an individual without his fault by reason of the use of a product should be spread among those who receive the benefits of the product, I would think it only proper to hold that the public as the recipient of the benefits of the public improvement ought to bear the irretrievable loss suffered by the individual whose use of his property is not noxious nor injurious to the public and whose only sin is that his property is located adjacent to the improvement.
In closing, I would call to my colleagues’ attention the cogent words of Mr. Justice Holmes in Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393, 67 L.Ed. 322, 43 S.Ct. 158, when he remarked that those who promote change must realize it has its limits or private property disappears.