Rancho Mirage Mobilehome Commu v. Coachella Valley Water Distric

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Decided: October 30, 2023
• Docket: 22-55212
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS OCT 30 2023 MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

RANCHO MIRAGE MOBILEHOME No. 22-55212 COMMUNITY, LP, a California limited D.C. No. 5:20-cv-02359-JWH-SHK partnership,

Plaintiff-Appellant, MEMORANDUM*

v.

COACHELLA VALLEY WATER DISTRICT,

Defendant-Appellee,

and

DOES, 1-10, inclusive,

Defendant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California John W. Holcomb, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted on October 16, 2023 Pasadena, California

Before: PAEZ and H.A. THOMAS, Circuit Judges, and RAKOFF, District

* This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. Judge.**

Plaintiff Rancho Mirage Mobilehome Community, LP owns a mobile home

park in Rancho Mirage, California. Defendant Coachella Valley Water District

provides sewer services to the park, at a cost set by ordinance, according to a formula

that incorporates a value of 55% of the customers’ average daily water usage over

the previous three years, divided by 200 (signifying the 200 gallons per day of indoor

water usage assumed for residential customers). Contending that the ordinance’s

formula is an unconstitutional overcharge, plaintiff sued the Water District in federal

court, alleging a violation of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment and also

bringing three state-law claims. The district court granted the Water District’s

motion to dismiss the Fifth Amendment claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure

12(b)(6) because the complaint failed to allege a compensable taking as a matter of

law. The court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the remaining

state-law claims and denied plaintiff’s request for leave to amend, as well as

plaintiff’s later motion for reconsideration. Reviewing the Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal

de novo, see Palm v. L.A. Dep’t of Water & Power, 889 F.3d 1081, 1085 (9th Cir.

2018), the denial of leave to amend for abuse of discretion, id., and the decision not

** The Honorable Jed S. Rakoff, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York, sitting by designation.

2 22-55212 to retain supplemental jurisdiction over the state-law claims for abuse of discretion,

see Carlsbad Tech., Inc. v. HIF Bio, Inc., 556 U.S. 635, 640 (2009), we now affirm.1

“The Takings Clause, applicable to the States through the Fourteenth

Amendment, provides that ‘private property [shall not] be taken for public use,

without just compensation.’” Tyler v. Hennepin County, 598 U.S. 631, 637 (2023)

(quoting U.S. Const. amend. V) (alteration in original). “It is beyond dispute[,]”

however, “that taxes and user fees . . . are not ‘takings.’” Koontz v. St. Johns River

Water Mgmt. Dist., 570 U.S. 595, 615 (2013) (alterations omitted). The Supreme

Court “said as much in County of Mobile v. Kimball, 102 U.S. 691, 703, 26 L.Ed.

238 (1881), and [its] cases have been clear on that point ever since.” Id. Because

plaintiff’s challenge is directed at the user fees that the Water District charges for its

sewer services, the complaint has not alleged a “taking” compensable under the Fifth

Amendment. See id.

In arguing to the contrary, plaintiff seizes on language from the Supreme

Court’s decision in United States v. Sperry Corp., 493 U.S. 52 (1989), that “a

reasonable user fee is not a taking if it is imposed for the reimbursement of the cost

of government services.” Sperry, 493 U.S. at 63. Plaintiff then argues that the fees

at issue here “do not bear sufficient correlation between the charges purportedly

owed to the [Water] District and the cost of providing those services.” But the

1 Plaintiff has not separately appealed the denial of the motion for reconsideration.

3 22-55212 Supreme Court “has never held that the amount of a user fee must be precisely

calibrated to the use that a party makes of Government services.” Id. at 60. “Nor

does the Government need to record invoices and billable hours to justify the cost of

its services.” Id. “All that” is “required is that the user fee be a ‘fair approximation

of the cost of benefits supplied.’” Id. (quoting Massachusetts v. United States, 435

U.S. 444, 463 n.19 (1978)).

In upholding the challenged user fee in Sperry, the Supreme Court

emphasized that its decision in Massachusetts “upheld a flat registration fee assessed

by the Federal Government on civil aircraft.” Id.2 “In holding that the registration

charge could be upheld because it was a user fee . . . the Court rejected

Massachusetts’ argument that the ‘amount of the tax is a flat annual fee and hence is

not directly related to the degree of use of the airways.’” Id. at 61 (quoting

Massachusetts, 435 U.S. at 463). “The Court recognized that when the . . .

Government applies user charges to a large number of parties, it probably will charge

a user more or less than it would under a perfect user-fee system, but [the Court]

declined to impose a requirement that the Government ‘give weight to every factor

2 Plaintiff argues that the district court somehow violated due process by citing Massachusetts because neither party mentioned the case in briefing below. But plaintiff’s opposition to the motion to dismiss quoted Sperry, which cites and relies on Massachusetts. In any event, there is simply no basis for the argument that due process forbids a court from citing cases other than those the parties directly cite in briefing.

4 22-55212 affecting appropriate compensation.’” Id. (quoting Massachusetts, 435 U.S. at 468).

Indeed, “the Just Compensation Clause has never been read to require the courts to

calculate whether a specific individual has suffered burdens in excess of the benefits

received in determining whether a ‘taking’ has occurred.” Id. at 61 n.7 (ellipses and

quotation marks omitted). But such a calculation is just what plaintiff would like the

courts to perform. The district court thus correctly dismissed the takings claim.3

Finally, the district court did not err in declining to exercise supplemental

jurisdiction over the state-law claims. “A district court’s decision whether to exercise

that jurisdiction after dismissing every claim over which it had original jurisdiction

is purely discretionary.” Carlsbad Tech., 556 U.S. at 639. Contrary to plaintiff’s

insinuation, there is no bright-line rule requiring a federal court to retain jurisdiction

over state-law claims after all federal claims have been dismissed merely because a

3 The district court was well within its discretion to deny plaintiff leave to amend the complaint, which plaintiff asked the court to do in its opposition to the motion to dismiss. Any amendment would be futile. See Carrico v. City & Cnty. of S.F., 656 F.3d 1002, 1008 (9th Cir. 2011). Plaintiff has identified no case, under any set of facts, where a court has held that a user fee for utilities is a constitutional taking. Although there may come a case where a “charge denominated by the government as a [user fee] becomes so arbitrary . . . that it was not [a user fee] but a confiscation of property[,]” Koontz, 570 U.S. at 617 (quotation marks omitted), the fees here— set by ordinance according to a formula that accounts for the “average daily water usage over the previous three years” for “RV/Trailer Park customers,”—“are not so clearly excessive as to belie their purported character as user fees[,]” Sperry, 493 U.S. at 62.

5 22-55212 federal case has been pending for a certain time. See id. at 639–40. Nor is there any

other basis to conclude that the district court abused its discretion.

AFFIRMED.

6 22-55212