Hoffman v. City of Town and Country

831 S.W.2d 223, 1992 Mo. App. LEXIS 736, 1992 WL 82651
CourtMissouri Court of Appeals
DecidedApril 28, 1992
Docket59436
StatusPublished
Cited by8 cases

This text of 831 S.W.2d 223 (Hoffman v. City of Town and Country) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Missouri Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Hoffman v. City of Town and Country, 831 S.W.2d 223, 1992 Mo. App. LEXIS 736, 1992 WL 82651 (Mo. Ct. App. 1992).

Opinion

SATZ, Judge.

This is a declaratory judgment action in which plaintiffs, partners in Centre Park Forty Associates (CP40), challenge the reasonableness of the residential zoning of their property located on the north outer road of Highway 40, in the defendant city, Town and Country. The trial court found the residential zoning to be unconstitutionally unreasonable. Town and Country appeals. We affirm.

Scope of Review

At the outset, the parties disagree about the scope of our review. Town and Country argues that we must review de novo the evidence adduced at trial, and, in turn, it also contends that our review is not restricted by the standards of appellate review established in Murphy v. Carron, 536 S.W.2d 30 (Mo. banc 1976). CP40 contends that challenges to the validity of zoning ordinances are to be reviewed de novo, but, in doing so, the appellate court must defer to the findings of the trial court in factual issues, “especially those that were made with respect to conflicting testimony.”

This disagreement stems, in part, from the review process itself and from the language used by our courts explaining that process. Both parties are partially correct.

In Missouri, zoning, rezoning and refusals to rezone are considered to be legislative acts, not quasi-judicial acts. E.g., Erigan Company, Inc. v. Town of Grantwood Village, 632 S.W.2d 495, 496 (Mo.App.1982). The review of the local legislative body’s grant or denial of rezoning is not initiated in a trial court by direct appeal on the record made before the legislative body, rather review is initiated by a plenary action, such as the request for a declaratory judgment to declare the grant or denial of rezoning to be a deprivation of *225 rights. See, e.g. Vatterott v. City of Florissant, 462 S.W.2d 711, 713 (Mo.1971). The trial court is, thus, not confined to nor concerned with the record made before the legislative body.

However, the challenger to the legislative body’s grant or denial of rezoning does not begin the plenary action unburdened. The grant or denial is presumed to be valid, with the burden placed upon the challenger to overcome that presumption. Id. In conjunction with and, perhaps, in amplification of that presumption, it is said that the decision of the legislative body to grant or deny rezoning, being a legislative act, will be upheld if the decision is “fairly debatable”. E.g., Elam v. City of St. Ann, 784 S.W.2d 330, 335 (Mo.App.1990); see Binger v. City of Independence, 588 S.W.2d 481, 486 (Mo. banc 1979) (annexation). In short, the trial court, in a plenary action, reviews a presumptively valid decision of the local legislative body to determine whether the decision was fairly debatable, on a record which may, and probably quite often does, differ from the record before the legislative body.

Normally, in this review process many of the operative, relevant facts are not in dispute, such as the topography of the land in question, the development of adjacent and nearby property and the history of that development. The dispute is usually between the opinions of the parties’ respective experts — one or more experts testifying the property is properly zoned, their counterparts testifying it is not. If the experts disagree on the operative facts underpinning their respective opinions, the trial court must credit one or the other. The facts discredited, in turn, discredit the opinion based upon them, and the facts credited, in turn, credit the opinion based upon them. If the trial court engages in this type of credibility determination, Rule 73.-01(c) and the mandate of Murphy v. Carron require us as an appellate court to defer to the trial court’s determination. See, e.g. National Super Markets, Inc. v. City of Bellefontaine Neighbors, 825 S.W.2d 24, 26-27 (E.D.Mo.App.1992).

But, quite often, the parties’ respective experts reach their individual opinions by using different sets of operative facts, and no expert disputes the facts used by an opposing expert. The credibility of the experts then “occupies a very narrow field; the questions are rather those of judgment, and the logic (or lack of it) in expert opinions.” Huttig v. City of Richmond Heights, 372 S.W.2d 833, 839 (Mo.1963); Loomstein v. St. Louis County, 609 S.W.2d 443, 447, n. 3 (Mo.App.1980).

Regardless of the determinations made by the trial court to reach its decision that the local legislative body’s grant or denial of rezoning was or was not fairly debatable, however, we, in reviewing the trial court’s decision, make our own independent determination of whether the legislative body’s decision was fairly debatable. Elam supra; Binger, supra. Thus, we said in Elam, perhaps inartfully, that “we review de novo ” any challenges to the acts of the legislative body. Elam, supra, 784 S.W.2d at 335. However, to the extent the trial court has discredited an expert’s opinion by discrediting the operative facts upon which that opinion is based, we are bound to defer to that determination in making our own independent determination of whether the legislative body’s grant or denial of rezoning was fairly debatable. National Super Markets, Inc., supra.

In the present case, the trial court adopted the report of the special master in which extensive findings of fact were made to support the conclusion that Town and Country’s refusal to rezone was unreasonable. The court, however, did not expressly discredit the facts upon which Town and Country’s experts based their opinions that the refusal to rezone was reasonable. More important, we cannot sensibly find the court so discredited those experts by implication. We cannot do so primarily because the court’s findings of fact are facts apparently inferred from the opinions of CP40’s experts and those opinions differ from the opinions of Town and Country’s experts because, for the most part, they are based upon different sets of operative facts. Thus, we do not find that the trial *226 court necessarily discredited Town and Country’s experts. However, we have read the 850 pages of transcript and read and viewed the 75 exhibits, and, independent of the trial court’s findings, we have reached the same conclusion it did: Town and Country’s refusal to rezone is unconstitutionally unreasonable and that issue is not fairly debatable.

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Bluebook (online)
831 S.W.2d 223, 1992 Mo. App. LEXIS 736, 1992 WL 82651, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/hoffman-v-city-of-town-and-country-moctapp-1992.