The Arizona Supreme Court issued an order Wednesday voiding an appellate court decision which prevented several Sierra Vista residents from suing the city over an announcement in 2020 that those residents could not continue to live in recreational vehicles (RVs) at a manufactured home subdivision.
The justices went on to order the Arizona Court of Appeals to issue a new ruling based on a recent supreme court opinion in another case, Mills v. Arizona Board of Technical Registration, which also involved a government entity attempting to block private citizens from pursuing constitutional challenges against the entity’s authority.
Mills had sued the Arizona Board of Technical Registration to prevent its interference with his work as an electrical engineer. The Board argued Mills could not initiate a lawsuit until its formal proceedings were completed, but the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruled that argument would leave Mills in a “legal limbo”
The same limbo was facing several Sierra Vista residents who were given notice in July 2020 of their non-compliance with city zoning. The 160-lot property involved in the dispute is considered a manufactured home subdivision even though it was referred to by city officials and residents as a mobile home park for decades.
Sierra Vista’s zoning code defines RVs as “temporary shelters” that are not allowed as permanent residences in a manufactured home subdivision. RVs are, however, permitted as permanent residences in some manufactured home park or a mobile home park.
The residents were given 30 days to remove their RVs, but no enforcement action was taken while city staff and zoning officials worked on a resolution. Due to the city’s housing situation, some of the longtime residents impacted by the city’s plan to enforce the zoning had nowhere else to move within the city.
In February 2021 the city council rejected a proposed amendment which would have let the effected residents to stay in place. So after doing what they could administratively, the residents and some owners of the lots on which those RVs were located then sued the city a few weeks later to preempt any city effort to enforce the zoning ordinance.
But a Cochise County judge and the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled there was not yet any “injury” suffered by anyone and therefore the residents and property owners could do nothing via the courts until the city actually took steps to make the residents move.
The Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation sided with the residents and asked the Arizona Supreme Court to hear the Sierra Vista case. Timothy Sandefur, attorney for the Institute, argued that when faced with a threat of eviction constantly hanging over their heads, the residents should not have to wait to actually become homeless to challenge the city’s zoning ordinance in court.
“This case is like a hypothetical situation in which a plaintiff files a lawsuit for an injunction to prevent a defendant from converting her personal property, or building a factory that will pollute her land, and the superior court tells her the case is unripe because no theft or pollution has yet occurred—before adding, ‘come back after your property has been stolen or ruined,’” Sandefur argued in a brief to the justices.
The Arizona Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to take the case. The justices then immediately threw out the appellate court’s ruling “in light of” the justices’ opinion in the Mills case that citizens have a right to turn to the courts when faced with legal limbo due to a government agency.
The matter will now be returned to the Arizona Court of Appeals for a new ruling. In the meantime, there is a court-ordered stay in place preventing any eviction action.