Court Opinion

ID: 9542451
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:34:35.054095+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:07:58.556011
License: Public Domain

FLANDERS, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent because I can discern no competent evidence in the record to support the trial justice’s decision to uphold the East Providence City Council’s denial of the application of the petitioner, Edmund A. Res-tiro, Jr., for subdivision approval.
The only legitimate issue presented by this subdivision application was whether petitioner’s proposal to subdivide his land into nine house lots would aggravate the undisputed ground-water-drainage problems in this residential area. The only competent evidence before the city council was that it would not. Indeed, the uncontradicted expert testimony was that the new drainage system to be constructed by petitioner would tend to alleviate the existing water problems in the area and that, in any event, the proposed development would not have an adverse impact upon whatever drainage problems presently existed.
Thus, notwithstanding the fact that petitioner’s subdivision plat complied with all the rules and regulations enacted by the city pertaining to subdivisions in this part of the city, his application was still rejected even though city council members “have no discretion to disapprove a plat that conforms to those rules.” Jeffrey v. Platting Board of Review of South Kingstown, 103 R.I. 578, 587, 239 A.2d 731, 737 (1968).10 Rather *672“[t]he approval or disapproval of a subdivision plat is an administrative or ministerial act which effectuates legislative policy.” E. Grossman & Sons, Inc. v. Rocha, 118 R.I. 276, 284, 373 A.2d 496, 500 (1977).
It is also important to note that the city council did not decide to disapprove this application unless the developer gave a ten-year guaranty in the form of a bond to protect current residents from the subdivision’s potential adverse impact on the existing water problems. Rather the council flatly rejected the application without conditioning its approval or disapproval on petitioner’s posting of a bond to pay for any water problems caused by the new development or on petitioner’s compliance with any other stipulation. Although a council member asked petitioner’s engineer whether he was willing to post such a bond, the council’s vote was not conditioned in any way on petitioner’s willingness or unwillingness to guarantee that existing residents would not suffer additional water problems as a result of the development. In other words, the city council never gave this plaintiff the option of posting a bond or satisfying any reasonable prerequisites as a condition of granting him approval to proceed with the subdivision. Rather, after petitioner stated, “[Y]ou cannot get someone to bond it * * *. It is impossible to measure whether or not someone has additional water problems[,]” the application was flatly denied.11
Pursuant to G.L.1956 § 45-23-20, petitioner sought review in the Superior Court. The trial justice’s job was to review the record to determine whether any competent evidence existed to support the city council’s decision to deny the application. After reviewing the record before the city council, a Superior Court justice pointed to two factors in deciding to uphold the council’s decision: first, the statement by petitioner’s engineer that the potential for ground water to flood basements in this location had been the greatest he had seen in such a wide area; second, several council members had personally visited the area where the proposed subdivision would be built and observed homes with water in their basements after a rainstorm.
But the council members’ personal observations and knowledge of the existing water problems in this area and the statement by petitioner’s engineer acknowledging the area’s potential for ground-water problems were hardly probative with respect to the crucial exacerbation issue: would the proposed subdivision pose an unacceptable risk of aggravating the existing water problems in the area, or would it, as the only competent evidence indicated, tend to alleviate the current water-drainage problem? Accordingly the residents and council members’ statements about the existing water problems in the area and their fears about what additional development might do to magnify this situation do not constitute competent evidence that the proposed subdivision would only tend to worsen the status quo. See Salve Regina College v. Zoning Board of Review of Newport, 594 A.2d 878, 881-82 (R.I.1991) (“Since the testimony offered”— lay opinions concerning potential traffic problems in the area to be developed which were “formed not from an impartial and professional perspective but rather from the perspective of a neighboring property owner who was altogether vehemently opposed to any further student habitation in his own neighborhood” — “was lacking in probative force and since the board had no other expert testimony or evidence in the record adverse to [the applicant] upon which it could base its findings and conclusions, we hold that the trial justice erred in finding that the *673evidence was sufficient to support the board’s determination”).12
The flawed logic supporting the denial of this proposed subdivision is as follows: this area has water-drainage problems; the proposed subdivision will intensify the land use in this area; therefore, the proposed subdivision presents an unacceptable risk that it will aggravate the existing water-drainage problems. The city seems to be under the erroneous impression that the more problems that it can cite showing how poor the existing water-drainage situation is, the more competent is the evidence supporting the council’s denial of this subdivision application. But when the city’s own experts and applicant’s experts have presented competent engineering evidence that the proposed subdivision and its elaborate new drainage system will alleviate these problems — and no other competent evidence contradicts this testimony — I am at a loss to understand how a mere recitation of how bad the current water problems are amounts to competent evidence that allowing the development will tend to worsen the status quo.
If the standard for approving subdivision plans is now to be a 100 percent bonded guaranty from the developer that no problems will ever arise from any of the subsequent development activity for ten years after construction is completed, then no such subdivision will ever be approvable and no denial of such a subdivision — no matter how arbitrary and devoid of competent factual support — will ever be reversible. Unfortunately in this ease, - that is the effective standard that was applied by the East Providence City Council and upheld by the Superior Court in affirming this denial.
This case raises a very important administrative law question: what evidence (if any) will be deemed competent by a court in reviewing a municipality’s rejection of a proposed subdivision plan'that otherwise conforms to all the city’s applicable rules and regulations? I do not believe that the applicable law grants to municipal authorities a roving commission to deny a permit to a proposed subdivision plat that otherwise conforms to all applicable rules and regulations merely because lay witnesses and members of the permitting authority can articulate some possibility that the development might someday prove to be problematic in some respect. To me, such an approach invites municipal officials to substitute rank speculation and conjectural claptrap for genuine engineering expertise and constitutes an open invitation for local planners to engage in incompetent fear-mongering about perceived or imagined development risks, no matter how unfounded, unlikely, or controllable such risks may be. Such an open-textured standard for upholding the denial of subdivision applications will all too easily be converted into an impermeable cloak to cover confiscatory regulatory takings, official pandering to neighbors’ antidevelopment biases, political shenanigans, and other such local governmental capriciousness of the sort that we recently condemned in L.A. Ray Realty v. Town Council of Cumberland, 698 A.2d 202 (R.I.1997) (holding that the petitioner property owners had established 42 U.S.C. § 1983 substantive and procedural due-process violations against town officials who arbitrarily *674denied the plaintiffs’ request for subdivision approval).
Moreover, the mere fact that the municipality might have to maintain the new pumping and drainage system to be installed and paid for by petitioner to realize the expected benefits of this new drainage system cannot be relied upon to constitute competent evidence to support the council’s denial. Indeed, this result is no different from what usually occurs after a proposed subdivision has been approved and accepted by the municipal authorities: the platted streets and all related improvements thereon (including catch basins, drainage systems, and culverts) become public property maintainable by the city after they have been constructed and accepted by the city’s governing body. See § 46-28-10 (although planning-commission approval of a plat shall be deemed public acceptance of the street, future maintenance and improvement duties require authorization from the municipality’s governing body). Additionally, I do not believe that prospective maintenance concerns about the proposed new drainage system constituted competent evidence to support the city council's denial of this petitioner’s subdivision application. Here, there was no evidence presented concerning how significant or substantial this cost would be or even that it would be any more burdensome to the city than its customary maintenance of other city streets and drainage systems. It is worth recalling that this is the same drainage system that was approved by the city’s public works department, by its planning board, and by its engineers and, according to all the experts, would alleviate the existing water-drainage problems besetting this area of the city. And yet we are told that because the city would have to maintain this new drainage system (for example, by keeping the new catch basins from clogging up with runoff debris), competent evidence thereby exists to support the denial of subdivision approval. But shall municipalities hereafter be able to claim in other subdivison cases that competent evidence exists for the municipality to reject a proposed subdivision because the platted streets shown thereon may someday develop potholes if they are not properly maintained by the municipality in the future? Given the alleged extent and gravity of this area’s existing water problems, the city’s future maintenance argument rings as hollow to me as a drowning man’s rejection of a proffered lifeline on the grounds that he may have to maintain his grip on the rope if he is to be pulled to shore.
Finally, it has been argued that the evidence presented to the city council concerning the actual observed effects of prior residential construction on the water situation in this area constituted “persuasive lay testimony” about the deleterious effects of allowing further development in this area. But there was no probative evidence introduced to indicate that any of these other obliquely referenced construction projects included any substantial efforts at all to address the water-drainage situation. Nor was there any suggestion that these other developments incorporated the same or a substantially similar type of comprehensive water-drainage system that was an integral part of this subdivision proposal. Accordingly, such unfounded anecdotal statements by lay witnesses and council members only served to showcase the type of incompetent evidence on which this permit denial was bottomed, and this court should be loathe to bestow a mantle of competency upon such invidious comparisons with the subject proposal. Indeed, to hold aloft, this type of anecdotal fluff as a shining example of “persuasive lay testimony” is to debase the kind of scientific causation evidence that courts should deem competent to buttress the denial of a subdivi-son application. Worse, it sanctions the use of misleading apples-to-oranges comparisons by incompetent lay witnesses to support a municipality’s arbitrary denial of such approvals. Even the trial justice — whose obligation to scour the municipal record for any morsel of legally sufficient evidence led her to believe (erroneously) that council members’ personal observations of existing wet basements constituted competent evidence to deny this permit — did not see fit to claim any probative value whatsoever for incompetent lay opinions about the allegedly causal effects of prior residential construction on the ground-water situation in this area.
*675To be sure, the city council was free to reject all the expert testimony — including that of its own experts — to the effect that the proposed subdivision’s new drainage system would in all likelihood help to alleviate the existing water problems in this area. But it gains nothing by doing so because, after rejecting the only competent evidence before it, the council was still left holding nothing but a porous evidentiary ragbag bursting with incompetent lay opinions and its own unfounded trepidations about whether the proposed drainage system would really perform as the city’s own engineers assured council members that it would. I also believe that when it comes to assessing whether a proposed water-drainage system will technically perform as designed, expert testimony does indeed have talismanic significance in the sense that, as contrasted with uninformed lay opinions and the conjuring-up of hypothetical bogeymen, it alone is competent to address this subject with any probative force.
In sum, because the record is barren of any competent evidence to support the city council’s denial of the subdivision approval, I believe the trial court misapplied the law, misconceived the evidence, and overlooked the absence of any factual support in the record for the proposition that the proposed subdivision presented an unacceptable risk of aggravating the existing water problems in the area. Indeed, the only competent evidence before the city council, as confirmed by the very engineering firm hired by the city to assess this situation, stated precisely to the contrary.
For this reason I would grant the petition for certiorari, quash the Superior Court’s affirmance of the city council’s decision to deny the subdivision, and remand this case to the Superior Court for the entry of a judgment ordering the approval to be issued.

. The majority claims that the dissent’s citation to the Jeffrey case "is misleading in this regard.” If so, I too have been misled. For I had it on the highest and most recent authority that Jeffrey’s *672“holding [was] that [a] planning board had no discretion to disapprove [a proposed subdivision] plat that conformed to [the] board’s rules.” See L.A. Ray Realty v. Town Council of Cumberland, 698 A.2d 202, 210 (R.I.1997) (Lederberg, J.) (citing Jeffrey case for this proposition).

. The petitioner was willing, however, to comply with all bonding requirements mandated by law, including the posting of a performance bond. See G.L.1956 § 45-23-6 (authorizing the local planning authorities to provide for the posting of a bond in lieu of final approval upon completion of the work to secure the actual construction and installation of the promised improvements). But the council denied the permit after plaintiff's attorney refused to accept an unauthorized request by a council member for a ten-year bond to guarantee that other residents’ water problems would not increase at any time during the next decade.

. The standard of review used by the Superior Court in affirming a municipality’s denial of a development permit is irrelevant to whether the evidence relied upon by the municipality to support the denial is legally competent. Although the standard of review may determine what quantum and weight of competent evidence is needed for the municipality’s position to be upheld, if the evidence it relies upon is incompetent, then the standard of review will have no impact on the ultimate result. The reason this is so is that if the evidence relied upon by the municipality to justify its denial lacks probative value, then not only will the permit denial fail to pass muster under the "substantial evidence of the entire record” test used to review the denial of zoning applications, see Salve Regina College v. Zoning Board of Review of Newport, 594 A.2d 878, 880 (R.I.1991), but it will also fail the "any competent evidence" test that has been used to review the denial of subdivision applications. See, e.g., Lett v. Caromile, 510 A.2d 958, 960 (R.I.1986). In any event the anomalous "any competent evidence” standard formerly used by the Superior Court to review municipal decisions on subdivision applications is no more. As of December 31, 1995, § 45-23-20 has been repealed, see § 45-23-28(C), and replaced by § 45-23-71, which provides inter alia for Superior Court review "of the reliable, probative, and substantial evidence of the whole record.” See § 45-23-71(0(5).