Court Opinion

ID: 9698320
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 19:47:42.230681+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:40.148596
License: Public Domain

Peterson, Justice
(dissenting).
Bloomington’s city council, as prescribed by Zylka v. City of Crystal, 283 Minn. 192, 167 N. W. 2d 45, stated reasons for denying the conditional-use permit — reasons conformable to the zoning ordinance guidelines for the city planning commission. The majority assumes that these findings were nothing more than a deferential adoption of the planning commission report — a variation of the trial court’s apparent assumption that the planning commission itself deferred completely to the Webster report. The effect of these assumptions is to conclude that the council’s stated reasons were a sham to disguise the council’s sole objective of hastening the discontinuance of plaintiff’s nonconforming use.1
*192We need not so discredit the motives of the city council, for the internal evidence supports a wholly different inference. The planning commission made three additional findings independent of the reason proposed by Webster, strongly indicative that the commission intended to base the recommended denial on more than one factor. The city council, concurring with those reasons, was not required to add or subtract from those reasons, or reword them, as a test of its “independence.”
The determinative issue is whether plaintiffs established that their proposed use met all the standards and conditions prescribed by the zoning ordinance, so that the council’s denial of the permit was without a reasonable basis. The failure of plaintiffs’ proposed use to meet any one or more of the conditions or standards reflected in the three findings and expressed in the ordinance would bar plaintiffs from obtaining a permit for such proposed use. One of the council’s findings, stated above, would constitute a legally sufficient basis for its action. The council found that the access to plaintiffs’ proposed service station would not be off an interior industrial street and that the traffic generated by the station would interfere with the normal patterns of traffic circulation. The minutes of the council meeting indicate that the council was independently aware of the arguments pro and con on this point, just as the divided vote of the council evinced it. Its adoption of the commission’s finding on this point was an implied adoption of the views of the city traffic engineer, Berg, whose investigation and report clearly provided reasonable support for this finding of the council. I would reverse.

 The trial court considered this objective impermissible and for that reason issued its writ of mandamus. In the different context of an expanded nonconforming use, we recently observed in County of Freeborn v. Claussen, 295 Minn. 96, 102, 203 N. W. 2d 323, 327 (1972) that a restriction against expansion is not unreasonable, since it “will enhance the possibility that [a landowner’s] nonconforming use will eventually be phased out.”