This eleven-plaintiff lawsuit was filed in November 2004, following 5- to 7-year administrative proceedings initiated by the landowners in January 1997. These proceedings – called Beneficial Use Determination (BUD) hearings – allowed Monroe County to override its restrictive land development regulations (LDRs) to avoid getting sued in inverse condemnation – which is what happened here.

Flush with "real estate bubble" money in 2004-05, the Monroe County Commission retained outside counsel – from Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Washington DC – in the belief that the more money it paid to lawyers, the better chance plaintiffs and their attorneys would give up and go away. Now, in 2009, Monroe County cannot even pay its employees, much less its out-of-state lawyers.

Monroe County's genius lawyers filed motion-after-motion, defenses-after-defenses, took depositions of every plaintiff and their spouses, including three elderly, non-resident plaintiffs who live in nursing homes as far away as California, and ran up bills of $1.2 million, plus another $130,000 in travel expenses, even before the new judge decided to dismiss this case in June 2007.

After Chief Judge Richard Payne retired at the end of 2006, a successor judge – who exhibited no understanding of this complex area of regulatory taking law, and treated the litigants with a pro-government bias – dismissed the case on statute of limitation grounds –  six months into his judicial career, on June 6, 2007. On June 30, 2008, a three-judge panel of Florida's Third District Court of Appeal heard oral arguments in Collins v Monroe County, as well as a companion case, Shands v City of Marathon –  dismissed by the same judge. The panel  –  comprised of Chief Judge David Gersten and District Court Judges Juan Ramirez and Richard Suarez –  was visibly unimpressed with the governments' statute of limitation theories. Written opinions, reversing the trial judge and remanding both cases to the trial court, were released on December 31, 2008.

For all the details of the Collins case, click on the links below. The State and County filed Petitions for Discretionary Review by the Florida Supreme Court, and the Collins response is due April 20, 2009.

To view a case's docket sheet, you need to access the Clerk's website. Click on: Official Records | Online Records | Accept | Civil Cases (do not click the search button). This opens a form where you can type in the case number, CA-M-04- 379 (Collins), or CA-M-07-99 (Shands) ,  then click Submit. Click on the icon under View Detail. This brings up the docket sheet in a popup window. (Disable popup blocker before clicking.) Print the docket sheet by clicking on the printer icon in the popup window.

Background Facts

September 15, 1986, marked a turning point in a series of legislative and administrative actions to "preserve" the Florida Keys, by imposing confiscatory land use regulations in violation of the Due Process and Taking Clauses of the Florida and United States Constitutions. Single-family, residential subdivisions were re-zoned to allow only one dwelling unit (DU) per acre, even though the lots rarely exceeded 7,500 sq ft in area. Building moratoria were imposed on large areas of the Keys, driving down property values and devastating the reasonable expectations of thousands of individual Keys' landowners.

In 1992, Monroe County adopted a rate-of-development (ROD) ordinance for a 10-year period, in order to "improve hurricane evacuation clearance times." In 1996, the Florida Administration Commission (the Governor and Cabinet, now just four elected officials) and the Florida Department of Community Affairs adopted, and forced Monroe County to adopt, even more confiscatory regulations. The County and State casually abandoned the "safety" rationale for controlling the rate of development in the Keys. In its stead, they morphed the ROD process into an unabashedly confiscatory scheme to destroy the market for undeveloped land. This has allowed the State and County to acquire thousands of privately-owned parcels for around 15% of the Fair Market Value the landowners would have received in an eminent domain proceeding.

On January 3, 1997, the eleven landowners in the Collins lawsuit filed Petitions for Beneficial Use Determinations (BUD) because their properties were undevelopable, either because of environmental or density restrictions, or were barred from use by moratoria of indefinite duration. In December 2000, four years after Plaintiffs had petitioned for administrative relief, a Monroe County Special Master conducted their BUD hearings. The Special Master recommended all 11 plaintiffs be paid Just Compensation, as the subject properties were unusable (and nobody knew when, or if, they might become useable in the future). After the Special Master released his Recommended Orders -- which took from one to three years -- the Monroe County Commission adopted his recommendations, by formal Resolutions between March 2002 and March 2004, in each of the 11 Plaintiffs' cases. Each Resolution concludes with the words that the petitioner is "entitled to Just Compensation."

But there was no connection between the phrase Just Compensation in the County's Resolutions, and the U.S. Supreme Court's definition of those words in the United States Constitution. Under Florida law, when private property owners are deprived -- by regulations, not physical occupation -- of substantially all beneficial use of their property, the owners are entitled to jury trials, in Eminent Domain, to determine the Just Compensation a condemning authority must pay.

By March 2004, the Collins plaintiffs had a 4-year statute of limitation clock ticking, starting with the dates of their BUD Resolutions, in which they could bring inverse condemnation suits against the County and/or the State. This has since been confirmed by the Third District Court of Appeal in Collins, et al. v. Monroe County & the State of Florida, Case No. 3D07-1603 (Dec. 31, 2008). Realizing that the government was not planning to compensate them, as required by both the Florida and U.S. Constitutions, the Collins plaintiffs brought this action for Just Compensation, against Monroe County and the State of Florida, on November 22, 2004.