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Good News for Property Owners: Court Decision on Sixty-Day Rule By Peter Coyle and Julie Nagorski Governmental agencies “must approve or deny within 60 days a written request relating to zoning” and a failure to do so results in an automatic approval of the application pursuant to Minnesota’s so-called “60-day Rule,” Minn. Stat. § 15.99. Under earlier Minnesota appellate court decisions, the 60-day Rule had been interpreted narrowly to apply only to zoning applications. The key case from 2003 had rejected a landowner’s claim that the 60-day Rule applied to a building permit application, instead determining that it covered only applications arising under the zoning ordinance, including special-use permits, conditional-use permits, variances, and site-plan approval. The Minnesota Supreme Court and the Minnesota Court of Appeals, however, have now issued decisions that interpret the 60-day Rule more broadly. This is good news for landowners, builders and developers. The Court of Appeals recently considered whether a landowner’s application to the Minnesota Department of Transportation for a permit for an ingress/egress access point for his property was subject to the 60-day Rule. In
Kottschade v. State of Minnesota, No. A131034 (Minn. App. Dec. 23, 2013), the landowner applied to MnDOT for permission to create and construct a driveway access from his property to the adjacent highway frontage road, without which his parcel lacked direct access to the public roads. MnDOT did not act on the request until 63 days after it was submitted, when it wrote a denial letter to the landowner. The lower court decided, based on the 2003 appellate decision, that the driveway access application was not a “written request relating to zoning” because it was not a zoning application and, therefore, MnDOT was not obligated to act on it within 60 days. The landowner in Kottschade appealed the lower court’s decision and, while the appeal was pending, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued its decision in 500, LLC v. City of Minneapolis, No. A11-1705, 2013 WL 5348308 (Minn. Sept. 25, 2013). In that case, the Minnesota Supreme Court held that an application for a certificate of appropriateness (for the alteration of a historic landmark under Minneapolis’s heritage preservation ordinances) was a written request relating to zoning and controlled by the 60-day Rule. continues on page 64
Governmental agencies “must approve or deny within 60 days a written request relating to zoning” and a failure to do so results in an automatic approval of the application pursuant to Minnesota’s socalled “60-day Rule.” – Minn. Stat. § 15.99
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Builders’ Digest
April-June 2014
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