-Caveat Lector- Enviros will find it harder to stick property owners with the bill. Tuesday, July 10, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT As the Supreme Court closed shop for the term, it issued an opinion that strongly reaffirmed property rights. That alone was cause for cheer. But the court's ruling in Palazzolo v. Rhode Island also had an important side effect: It sent a message that all of society--not just a few unlucky landowners--must be prepared to bear the cost of environmental regulation. Anthony Palazzolo, an 80-year-old retired auto wrecker, wanted to build on coastal property in Rhode Island that he'd owned for 40 years. The problem? At some point in his tenure the land had been designated protected wetlands. Mr. Palazzolo's many requests for building permits were denied; he finally sued for compensation. The state courts said he had no case. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, and ordered Rhode Island's courts to revisit the question of whether he is owed "just compensation" for the lost value of his property. What happened to Mr. Palazzolo is an increasingly common and nefarious practice known as a "regulatory taking." The Constitution prohibits the government from taking a citizen's land for public use, such as bridges or roads, without just compensation. But regulatory "takings" are trickier: The state doesn't actually grab your land; it just bars you from doing anything with it. Politicians and activist groups figured out that regulatory takings were a speedy--and extremely cheap--way of delivering on environmental promises. And so in Virginia, retired contractor John Taylor is unable to build a house on a lot he owns (in the middle of a development) because it might disturb a nearby bald eagle. In Oregon, Alvin and Marsha Seiber were made to set aside 37 acres of their 200-acre commercially harvestable forest land to protect the northern spotted owl. And in California, vintners and farmers have found themselves effectively barred from activity because it might hurt the emergency-listed tiger salamander. The difficulty here isn't necessarily that society passed laws to save the environment. Rather, it's that one group of people--individual property owners--are footing the bill for everyone else. Owners who have the bad fortune of landing in the (protected) silver rice rat's "natural habitat" find themselves barred from commercial enterprise and watch their land values plummet. Property-rights groups estimate that owners have shouldered hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of "the nation's" environmental good. Property owners who fight back run into a steely opposition. Florida passed the Bert Harris Property Act in 1995, allowing owners compensation when restrictions cause property values to decline. Environmental groups have vowed to overturn the law. Last year, Oregon citizens passed Measure 7, an initiative that would provide similar financial relief. Within weeks, several of Oregon's largest cities and counties had a lawsuit seeking to have the measure declared unconstitutional. Politicians in the state have complained (without irony) that the government could never afford to compensate landowners for all the property it takes each year (by the state's own reckoning, $5.4 billion annually). But at least one part of government seems to be catching on to all this rights-trampling: the courts. In addition to Palazzolo, a key precedent in environmental law was just set in California, where farmers and ranchers in the Tulare Lake Basin sued the state after being cut off from water between 1992 and 1994 because of endangered fish. In April, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims held that the loss of water constituted a clear government "taking" of property, and that the farmers must be compensated. The court hit the mark in noting that the Fifth Amendment is intended "to bar government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole." What the claims court has potentially done is to set the stage for a new era of environmental responsibility. The key problem in America's environmental debate is that most people have no concept of how much it costs to protect natural resources, and so feel there's nothing to lose from more regulations. This might start to change. The Tulare farmers say the damages for the loss of water come to $25 million. Mr. Palazzolo--should he now win in Rhode Island--says his lost economic opportunity is more than $3 million. Up to now, everyone has gotten a free ride on the backs of individuals whose property happened to be standing in the middle of the latest set-aside whim of the local bureaucrats or activists. In the future we may have to set some environmental priorities. The specter of spiraling tax bills to compensate innocent property owners may cause some long overdue second thoughts about environmentalist overreaching. That in turn could instill some common sense into that famous phrase, "earth in the balance." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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