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Thursday, April 03, 2008

Ind. Decisions - Supreme Court decides Carmel gravel mining case

In The City of Carmel, Indiana v. Martin Marietta Materials, Inc., a 13-page, 5-0 opinion, Justice Sullivan writes:

The City of Carmel enacted an ordinance regulating mining within the City. The trial court prohibited enforcement of the ordinance based on the argument of Martin Marietta Materials, Inc., a mining concern, that the City did not follow the statutory requirements applicable to enacting zoning ordinances. We find that the City was not required to utilize the zoning process in order to regulate mining in this way. * * *

[T]he General Assembly has set forth a number of explicit procedural requirements for local units of government to exercise its powers and Martin Marietta is certainly correct that the mandates of the statutes as to the enactment of ordinances must be followed for those ordinances to be valid. * * *

In summary, the City has enacted the Ordinance in a general exercise of its authority to “regulate conduct, or use or possession of property, that might endanger the public health, safety, or welfare” as authorized by I.C. § 36-8-2-4 without complying with the special requirements applicable to zoning ordinances mandated by the 600 Series Procedures. Martin Marietta believes that a city ordinance regulating mining may be enacted only by complying with the 600 Series Procedures. The trial court agreed and entered a preliminary injunction prohibiting enforcement of the Ordinance on this basis. The Court of Appeals affirmed on this basis as well.

We do not agree with Martin Marietta’s view that the language of title 36, article 7 indicates that the General Assembly intended to subject the regulation of mining exclusively to the zoning process. * * *

[S]everal Indiana decisions have upheld ordinances that regulated how property was used and maintained, but were not zoning ordinances. See, e.g., Spitler v. Town of Munster, 214 Ind. 75, 14 N.E.2d 579 (1938) (regulating the maximum length of stay and minimum size of sleeping rooms in tourist camps); Mathys v. City of Berne, Inc., 501 N.E.2d 1142, 1143 (Ind. Ct. App. 1986) (prohibiting storage of inoperative cars or scrap metal on one’s personal premises); Starzenski v. City of Elkhart, 659 N.E.2d 1132, 1140 (Ind. Ct. App. 1996), trans. denied (prohibiting the storage of excess trash and debris on one’s personal premises).

To repeat, a unit’s zoning power is a subset of its police power; they are not mutually exclusive. But the fallacy in Martin Marietta’s argument is its contention that when a unit exercises its police power, at least with respect to mining, the unit is compelled to utilize the zoning process. When dictating what type of land use is permitted and where, a unit must employ the zoning process and follow the 600 Series Procedures. But beyond that, a unit may, but is not required to, use the zoning process to regulate mining. In the alternative, the City may proceed as it did here. * * *

Conclusion. The decision of the trial court is reversed.

The ILB has posted a number of entries on the efforts of the Cities of Carmel and Martinsville to regulate grvel mining within their jurisdictions. Access a list here.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 3, 2008 04:16 PM
Posted to Ind. Sup.Ct. Decisions