Court Opinion

ID: 9672168
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:50:12.43963+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:18:09.530198
License: Public Domain

McGEE, Justice
(concurring,).
The Court has held that property may be damaged within the meaning of the Constitution when access through an appurtenant easement is “materially and substantially” impaired by the construction of a public improvement. This Court is in effect saying that a man’s property may be damaged by a public improvement, but regardless of how much or how little damage may arise, if it is caused by an impairment of access, no compensation will lie unless the impairment is “material and substantial.”
I do not find constitutional justification for this holding of the Court. Article 1, Sec. 17 of the Constitution of Texas, Vernon’s Ann.Stat., provides that:
“No person’s property shall be taken, damaged or destroyed for or applied to public use without adequate compensation being made, * ⅜
This article was adopted in 1876, replacing the language of the 1869 Constitution that “[N]o person’s property shall be taken or applied to public use without *5just compensation being made” with the phrase that adequate compensation shall be made whenever property is “taken, damaged, or destroyed” for public use. There is no limitation in this constitutional provision providing that adequate compensation for damage to property caused by a public improvement should not be paid if a resulting impairment of an easement of access is not “material and substantial.” To this writer, this provision means that any damage, beyond that de minimis or nominal in nature, caused to property by impairment of its appurtenant easement of access is compensable irrespective of the degree of impairment.
Furthermore, to this writer, as a practical matter the determination of what constitutes a “material and substantial” impairment of an easement of access is if anything more difficult and uncertain than the determination of the today rejected standard of whether “reasonable access remains.” Obviously, under the rule announced by the Court today, a whole street cannot be closed by the construction of a public improvement without compensation being paid to abutting landowners as was done in Archenhold Automobile Supply Co. v. City of Waco, 396 S.W.2d 111 (Tex.Sup.1965). But the question of what constitutes material and substantial impairment of access remains indeterminate and is, indeed, perhaps impossible to generally resolve.
Turning to the facts of the dispute at bar, both respondents abut 165 feet on South 17th Street, and assuming arguendo that the two pillars on the extremities of their abutment constitute an impairment of their adjacent easement of access, both respondents at worst have been denied less than ten per cent of their adjacent easement of access. If this is a “material and substantial” impairment, there seems little difference between the degree of impairment such a finding necessitates and a simple holding that whenever there is probative evidence of damage to property due to an impairment of an adjacent easement of access caused by the construction of a public improvement, compensation may lie under Article 1, Sec. 17 of our Constitution.
In sum, today’s introduction of a “substantial and material” standard limiting compensation is to my mind not only not in keeping with the intent of the Constitution but also a needless and unnecessary complication of the Article 1, Sec. 17 provision giving a cause of action to a landowner for damage to his property caused by construction of a public improvement.
I believe the proper interpretation of Article 1, Sec. 17 to be that the jury or court may award compensation for damage whenever there is evidence of probative force that there has been a diminution in value in abutting property because of an impairment of an adjacent easement of access caused by the construction of a public improvement.
I concur in affirming the judgments of the courts below.
CALVERT, C. J., and SMITH and HAMILTON, JJ., dissent.