Cioffoletti v. Planning & Zoning Commission

599 A.2d 9, 220 Conn. 362, 1991 Conn. LEXIS 481
CourtSupreme Court of Connecticut
DecidedNovember 12, 1991
Docket14329
StatusPublished
Cited by15 cases

This text of 599 A.2d 9 (Cioffoletti v. Planning & Zoning Commission) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Connecticut primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Cioffoletti v. Planning & Zoning Commission, 599 A.2d 9, 220 Conn. 362, 1991 Conn. LEXIS 481 (Colo. 1991).

Opinion

Shea, J.

This appeal is the sequel to our decision in Cioffoletti v. Planning & Zoning Commission, 209 Conn. 544, 552 A.2d 796 (1989) (Cioffoletti I). In our [364]*364order of remand, we instructed the trial court to conduct further proceedings related to whether the plaintiffs, Robert and Catherine Cioffoletti, had been deprived of their property rights unconstitutionally1 by the refusal of the defendant, the planning and zoning commission of the town of Ridgefield,2 to grant in its entirety their application for a permit to expand their sand and gravel mining activities. After the remand hearing, the trial court, Karazin, Jagain rendered judgment upholding the action of the commission, concluding that no taking without just compensation had occurred. In appealing from that judgment, the plaintiffs contest the court’s conclusion as unsupported by the evidence and as involving a deviation from our mandate in Cioffoletti I. They also contend that the denial of a permit to excavate the entire area proposed in their application constitutes a taking as a matter of law, in view of the evidence of the financial benefits they are prevented from realizing and the minimal evidence of adverse effects upon the public interest. We affirm the judgment.

In Cioffoletti I, the trial court, Moraghan, J., had upheld the decision of the commission, but had refused to admit evidence offered to the court by the plaintiffs of the economic impact of the partial denial of their permit application, thus limiting the evidentiary basis for determining their claim of a taking of property without due process of law to the record of the hearing before the defendant commission. We concluded that General Statutes 22a-43a (a)3 contemplated “that the trial court should decide the taking issue de novo in the [365]*365light of all the evidence properly presented to it, including, but not limited to, the administrative record.” Id., 551. We also declared that the incorrect “evidentiary ruling has necessitated a remand for further proceedings related to [the taking] claim so that the trial court [could] make findings related thereto.” Id., 562.

At the remand hearing, the plaintiffs were permitted to present their economic impact evidence as well as other testimony. Their expert witnesses testified that, if an excavation permit had been granted, as requested, for the entire ten acre tract, which consisted mostly of wetlands that included a 2.6 acre pond, the plaintiffs’ property would have a value of $1,685,000, but that its value with the permit granted by the commission, limiting the excavation area to 4.6 acres, was only $760,000, a diminution in potential value of $925,000. Evidence was also presented that the plaintiffs had acquired the ten acre wetlands area as part of a twenty-four acre property purchased on October 15, 1982, for $260,000.

At the remand hearing it appeared that the plaintiffs had applied for a permit to remove no more than 200,000 cubic yards of sand and gravel from the ten acre wetlands tract over a period of ten years.4 An engineer who testified for the plaintiffs at the remand hearing stated that his computations indicated that 175,000 cubic yards of gravel and 25,000 cubic yards of fill could be excavated from the 4.6 acres.

[366]*366Although it did not rely upon adverse effects of the proposed excavation upon the public, the trial court found that the record of the hearing before the commission was “full of reasons concerning the public interest and the advancement of the public interest.” The memorandum of decision refers specifically to complaints about “traffic and noise problems at the mining site” and to the testimony of experts concerning the “adverse impact on the existing flood plain portions of the wetlands” from the proposed excavation and the “possibility of diminished water quality that might result if oil and gasoline used to operate the mining equipment were spilled and thereafter entered the ground water system.” The court held it unnecessary, however, to decide whether these concerns outweighed the economic detriment suffered by the plaintiffs from the denial of permission to extract the maximum quantity of material from their property.

The trial court made two findings that it considered decisive: (1) the value of the plaintiffs’ property had increased from $260,000, its purchase price on October 15, 1982, to $760,000 on April 10, 1985, the date of their expert’s appraisal, as a result of the commission’s approval of mining operations on the 4.6 acre parcel; and (2) the plaintiffs, under the permit granted, could remove approximately the same amount of material that they had declared to the commission they intended to remove if their application were granted in full. Relying upon these findings, the court concluded that “no taking ha[d] occurred without just compensation.”

I

The plaintiffs claim that there is no competent evidence to support the trial court’s finding that the value of their property had increased as a result of the commission’s grant of a permit to excavate 4.6 acres of the [367]*367ten acre tract for which the application sought a permit. This contention is virtually frivolous because the testimony and report of their own expert witness amply support that finding. Using the capitalization of income approach to valuation, the plaintiffs’ appraiser capitalized the projected net income that would be generated from the excavation of the 4.6 acre parcel and arrived at a value of $760,000 for the twenty-four acre tract on April 10,1985, the appraisal date. That witness also testified that the property had been purchased on October 15, 1982, by the plaintiffs for $260,000. Because the valuation of $760,000 was based almost entirely on the capitalization of income from the excavation of the 4.6 acre parcel, it was not unreasonable for the court to infer that the increase of $500,000 since its purchase, two and one-half years previously, had resulted from the grant of a permit to excavate on that parcel. Dotson v. Warden, 175 Conn. 614, 616, 402 A.2d 790 (1978). There was no evidence of any factor other than the granting of the permit for the 4.6 acres that would account for this remarkable appreciation in land value during such a relatively brief period of time.

The plaintiffs have not attacked the evidentiary basis for the finding of the trial court that the permit granted by the commission allows the removal of approximately 200,000 cubic yards of material, approximately the same quantity that they stated at the hearing before the commission that they intended to excavate from the entire ten acre tract, if their application had been granted as proposed.

II

The plaintiffs claim that the trial court departed from our remand order in Cioffoletti I by failing to set forth the facts they claim to have proved relating to the financial loss they have sustained from the denial of permis[368]*368sion to excavate on the remaining 5.4 acres of the land described in the application. “It is the duty of the trial court on remand to comply strictly with the mandate of the appellate court according to its true intent and meaning.” Nowell v. Nowell, 163 Conn.

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Bluebook (online)
599 A.2d 9, 220 Conn. 362, 1991 Conn. LEXIS 481, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/cioffoletti-v-planning-zoning-commission-conn-1991.