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Calif. man hit with $23,000 in fees to build house on own property sues all the way to SCOTUS

January 25, 2024 | | Print Article

A man relocated from New Jersey to northern California intending to build a house on property near Lake Tahoe only to get a gigantic shock when he was slapped with massive impact fees.

George Sheetz worked for 50 years in construction, saving his money for retirement. He purchased a vacant lot near Tahoe and decided to put a manufactured home on his beautiful little piece of land. That’s when the California government stepped in wanting their pound of flesh.

He went to get a building permit for the land and was issued a “traffic impact mitigation” fee totaling over $23,000. The fee was put in place a few years earlier by the county legislature to ostensibly pay for roadwork.

“That’s when I started getting p*ssed off,” Sheetz told Fox News Digital in an interview. “I said, ‘This is ridiculous.’”

(Video Credit: Fox News)

Sheetz is no stranger to building homes or the costs attached to them. He is very familiar with what administrative processes and costs should be and this amount wasn’t acceptable in his assessment. But the powers-that-be in California told him that if he didn’t like it, he could just leave.

“Well, you don’t have to build here,” a county official told Sheetz when he objected to the outrageous fee. “Go someplace else.”

They had him cornered in 2016 since he’d already put a down payment on the manufactured home. He was forced to pay the monstrous fee. But the story didn’t end there. Sheetz sued the county asserting that the fee he was charged was not proportionate to the impact his home would have on roads in the area.

“Mr. Sheetz thought that this was outrageous, that his small, 1,800-square-foot manufactured home wouldn’t cause anything like those kinds of traffic impacts,” Sheetz’s attorney, Paul Beard, explained to Fox News. “What the county did to Mr. Sheetz was fundamentally unfair. The county asked Mr. Sheetz to pay for pre-existing deficiencies on a highway and local roads as the condition of issuing him a permit.”

“They asked him to pay for traffic impacts caused by other uses and developments like retail development and office development,” the attorney added. “Why should he have had to pay for those pre-existing deficiencies and for those impacts caused by other uses?”

What followed was a seven-year legal battle that has now made its way to the Supreme Court. Beard and attorneys from the Pacific Legal Foundation argued Sheetz’s case in front of the high court earlier in January.

“I never dreamed we’d ever get to [the Supreme Court], to be honest with you,” Sheetz commented. “I just wanted to fight the fight because I knew what they were doing was wrong.”

“El Dorado County, however, argued that its fee was needed to pay for road maintenance and is similar to other local governments’ fees that fund parks, police departments, and other services. Beard said the government has every right to collect revenue to bankroll such services that would benefit the public, but the way the county is doing it is illegal,” Fox News reported.

“The outcome of this case could have nationwide ramifications on how local agencies fund the cost of providing needed public infrastructure, such as roads and firefighting equipment,” Deputy Chief Administrator Carla B. Hass remarked in January to ABC10. “The county fees under attack have already been upheld by the California Superior Court and California Court of Appeal, which confirmed that the county complied with all applicable requirements for the imposition of development impact mitigation fees.”

Sheetz and his attorney, however, are determined to see this through despite the lower courts in California siding with El Dorado County over the fee.

“It doesn’t matter who imposes the fee, whether it’s a bureaucrat behind the permit counter or whether it’s the legislative body, it’s all the same,” Beard insisted. “A taking is a taking.”

“Every American should want his or her rights protected against violations by the government, regardless of which branch of government does the violation,” he remarked.

If the case goes against Sheetz, his attorney fears that governments across the country will be able to impose fees for land use without oversight from the courts.

“What that means is that the costs of general public infrastructure projects, which should be borne by the public as a whole via taxes, will now be borne entirely by new development and new project applicants,” Beard stated.

If Sheetz prevails, governments would bear the burden of proving the fees they levy for land use permits are proportionate to the impact of any new project, according to the attorney.

“The average person has got to stand up, take a stand, and say, ‘Hey, we’re not going to put up with this crap anymore,’” Sheetz argued. “You’re just p*ssing money away. You’re taking it from the working person.”

“The average, everyday working person is busting their a** to try to survive and try to figure out a way to survive and retire comfortably,” he pointed out. “You can’t keep taking money from the working class that are supporting this country and screwing ’em.”

The Supreme Court is scheduled to issue a ruling on Sheetz’s case by June 30.

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