5.4. SR 05-17-2010 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

I. As a general matter, a zoning application may be affected by changes in laws that were adopted after the applicati®n was filed. A. "No individual can acquire a vested right to a particular zoning scheme." Wedemeyer v. City of Minneapolis, 540 N.W.2d 539, 542 (Minn. Ct. App. 1995). 1. In Wedemeyer, the court criticized the property owners' suggestion that a city must formally pass an ordinance amending its zoning plan before freezing a permit application, noting that "Under that system, a city would need to anticipate all future, and possibly harmful, uses for property an enact formal ordinances before any applications were submitted or else it would be effectively estopped from rejecting or even delaying those applications." Id. 2. Like other systems, local zoning laws often must be in a constant state of flux. a. Rules adopted based on one set of assumptions and factual premises often must change when those assumptions and factual premises change. (i) As Austrian philosopher Kurt Gadel recognized in his Incompleteness Theorem, every complex system or set of rules, no matter how thorough or valid, will produce at its outer boundaries paradoxes that cannot be adequately handled by the system. In that respect, all valid systems of rules are inherently incomplete. That is, there are problems for which a solution exists but cannot be found by use of the system. See Kurt Godel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions (1962) (translation of original paper in Monatshefte fuN Mathematik and Physik, 38 at 173-198 (1931)). B. In Minnesota, submission of an application for a permit or land use change generally does not constrain the government's ability to modify the laws governing a proposed development. 1. As the Minnesota Supreme Court noted in Almquist v. Town of Marshan, the rule in most jurisdictions "permits the retroactive 1