Winter 2016 (48:1)

Local Government

Population Forecasting and Planning Authority

by Edward J. Sullivan

While attitudes may be changing slowly, Americans tend to put more faith in land use regulation than in comprehensive planning for their future. Zoning regulations provide for concrete limits on land use, while plans are often deemed advisory or, when legally effective, are cast in broad platitudinous policies that can be manipulated to suit multiple political purposes. Plans, however, may serve as an important and binding means of predicting the future when they provide for a description of future, anticipated land uses, through a map or otherwise, of land use allocations. These allocations achieve credibility when they have an adequate factual basis. One of the principal building blocks of such a factual base is an informed prediction of future population for a given jurisdiction over a given timeframe.

Eminent Domain

Sacred in the City: The Huron Indian Cemetery & the Preservation Laws

by John W. Ragsdale, Jr.

The Huron Indian Cemetery sits on a hill above the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers. It is several acres of predominant green, with grass, mature trees, and modest, weathered gravestones, surrounded by the sterile concrete of a struggling Midwestern city. Desultory businesses, colorless governmental offices, a casino, and strong evidence of poverty and vandalism lap at the shores of the small sanctuary. Yet despite the drabness and essential joylessness of the encircling faded modernity, the cemetery holds a surprising sense of peace and even timelessness.2 The serenity may seem incongruous, not only because of the tawdry surroundings, but also because of the cemetery’s chaotic history as a center of numerous legal and economic conflicts.

Local Government

A Pragmatic Proposition: Regionally Planned Costal TDRs in Light of Rising Seas

by Daniel J. Depasquale

CLIMATE CHANGE IS UPON US, and there is ample research displaying that it is here to stay.2 Current research points to dramatic increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since 1750, making it likely that the climate changes seen today are caused mostly by past and present human activity.3 More specifically, “[w]arming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.”4

Local Government

Case Notes

Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Ctr., Inc., 135 S. Ct. 1378 (2015); Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests v. Joyce, 779 F.3d 785 (8th Cir. 2015); Bryant v. Texas Dep’t of Aging & Disability Servs., 781 F.3d 764 (5th Cir. 2015); Jucha v. City of N. Chicago, 63 F. Supp. 3d 820 (N.D. Ill. 2014); Sansotta v. Town of Nags Head, 97 F. Supp. 3d 713 (E.D.N.C. 2014); Hutchens v. Chicago Bd. of Educ., 781 F.3d 366 (7th Cir. 2015); Prof ’l Massage Training Ctr. Inc. v. Accreditation Alliance of Career Sch. and Coll. (4th Cir. 2015); Grill v. City of Denver Cnty. Bd. of Equalization, 344 P.3d 870 (Colo. 2015); Cannabis Action Coal. v. City of Kent, 351 P.3d 151 (Wash. 2014); Johnson v. City of Seattle, 335 P.3d 1027 (Wash. 2014); Tweedy v. Matanuska-Susitna Borough Bd. of Adjustment and Appeals, 332 P.3d 12 (Alaska 2014); Get Back Up, Inc. v. City of Detroit, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 4049 (6th Cir. 2015); Cleveland MHC, LLC v. City of Richland, 2015 Miss. LEXIS 230 (Miss. 2015); Kitsap Cnty. v. Kitsap Rifle and Revolver Club, 337 P.3d 328 (Wash. Ct. App. 2014);