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Construed in favor of ERL, there is no City Code requirement that the State-mandated <br />200-foot buffer be located within the SWF overlay district. <br />3. RULE OF CONSTRUCTION NO. 3: Ambiguities are <br />construed per the underlying policy <br />Zoning ordinances must be considered in light of their underlying policy goals. See <br />Ff^ank's Nut^sery Sales, Inc. v. City of Roseville, 295 N.W.2d 604, 608 (Minn. 1980); see <br />also Medical Se~^vs., Inc. v. City of Savage, 487 N. W.2d 263, 266 (Minn. App. 1992). <br />Any ambiguity in the City Code regarding whether the State-mandated 200-foot buffe-• <br />has to be located within the SWF overlay district is, therefore, to be construed per the <br />purpose for the provision at issue. <br />The State-mandated 200-foot buffer has elsewhere been applied precisely as advocated <br />here by the ERL. Ex. 145. The City cannot, therefore, suggest in good faith that its <br />purpose will be undermined by the ERL's construction. <br />Indeed, the City staff previously agreed (albeit implicitly) with the ERL's position. In <br />response to the ERL and Tiller's October 2002 application to expand what the City staff <br />dubbed the mining "component" of the landfill 150 feet into the State-mandated 200-foot <br />buffer, the City staff explained that the put°pose of the State-mandated 200-foot buffer is <br />to protect the adjacent landowners' "land values." Ex. 98 at 2-3 ("[t]he current two <br />hundred (200) foot buffer [into. which it was then seeking to expand] was put in place to <br />provide adeduate screening and distance between landfill activities and the [Tiller] <br />property to the south to help protect [Tiller's] land value and limit impacts on future uses <br />of that property"). As with the neighboring landowner to the Burnsville Sanitary Landfill <br />(Ex. 145), adjacent landowners, like Tiller here, can protect their "land values" by an <br />agreement with the landfill regarding the State-mandated 200-foot buffer. In fact, if the <br />City staff had construed its City Code as requiring the State-mandated 200-foot buffer to <br />be located within the SWF overlay district regardless of any agreement between the ER1_, <br />and Tiller, then it would have said so in response to the ERL.'s 2002 application. It did <br />T:\0742\I4oC\CitrAppFeb\pED Repon_linnl (2).doc 3-24 <br />