A FOREVER RECOVERY, INC.; TIA Corporation, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. TOWNSHIP OF PENNFIELD, Defendant-Appellant.
Nos. 13-2657, 14-1354
United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.
April 2, 2015.
279
BOGGS, Circuit Judge.
BOGGS, Circuit Judge.
Defendant-Appellant Pennfield Charter Township (Pennfield) appeals the district court‘s award of attorney‘s fees under
I. BACKGROUND
AFR is a Michigan Corporation owned by co-plаintiff TIA. Pennfield is a Michigan charter township that includes parts of Battle Creek, Michigan. In 2002, Pennfield amended a conditional-use permit and granted a use variance to allow the property located on 216 and 218 Saint Mary‘s Lake Road in Battle Creek, Michigan to function as a drug-and-alcohol treatment center. Since that time, AFR has operated the Saint Mary‘s Lake Road property as a drug-and-alcohol treatment facility.
In 2012, the Plaintiffs sought to expand the facility and applied for a building per
On July 19, 2013, Pennfield removed the case to federal district court on the basis оf federal-question jurisdiction under
II. DISCUSSION
A
“District courts hаve considerable discretion to award or deny costs and attorney fees under
B
A defendant can remove a civil case from state court to federal district court if the plaintiff could have filed in federal district court originally.
As a general rule, the award of fees is inappropriate if thе removing party had “an objectively reasonable basis for seeking removal.” Martin v. Franklin Capital Corp., 546 U.S. 132, 141, 126 S. Ct. 704, 163 L. Ed. 2d 547 (2005); see also Paul v. Kaiser Found. Health Plan of Ohio, 701 F.3d 514, 523 (6th Cir. 2012) (“Absent unusual circumstances, courts may award attorney‘s fees under § 1447(c) only where the removing party lacked an objectively reasonable basis for seeking removal.“) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted).
We therefore apply a two-step test to review the award of attorney‘s fees under
C
A defendant seeking to remove a case pursuant to
Pennfield argues that removal in this case was objectively reasonable because Count II of the complaint alleges that Pennfield‘s actions constitute “violations of the Petitioners’ Substantive Due Process Rights under the [Fourteenth Amendment of the] United States Constitution” and “a regulatory taking of the Property under the [Fifth Amendment of the] United States Constitution.” Appellant‘s Br. at 8. The district court disagreed, holding that Pennfield lacked an objectively reasonable bаsis for removal because it was aware that clear Supreme Court precedent establishes that the federal takings and substantive-due-process claims against Pennfield were unripe. A Forever Recovery, 2013 WL 9873171, at *5.
In Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City, 473 U.S. 172 (1985), the Supreme Court held that a federal takings сlaim against a state-government entity is not ripe unless (1) the state-government entity has reached a final decision with respect to the property, and (2) the property owner has sought compensation through state-law procedures. Id. at 186, 194. Without meeting the finality and state-litigation requirements, a federal takings claim is unripe regardless of “whether it is analyzed as a deprivation of property without due process under the Fourteenth Amendment, or as a taking under the Just Compensation Clause of the Fifth Amendment.” Id. at 200.
In this case, the Plaintiffs’ federal takings and substantive-due-process claims were indisрutably unripe because they had
However, a federal court can exercise subject-matter jurisdiction over a case that is unripe under Williamson County in certain circumstances. The Supreme Court has clarified that Williamson County ripeness requirements are only “prudential” rather than jurisdictional. Horne v. Dep‘t of Agric., 569 U.S. 513, 133 S. Ct. 2053, 2062, 186 L. Ed. 2d 69 (2013) (“[W]e have recognized that [Williamsоn County ripeness] is not, strictly speaking, jurisdictional.“); see also Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Dep‘t of Envtl. Prot., 560 U.S. 702, 729, 130 S. Ct. 2592, 177 L. Ed. 2d 184 (2010); San Remo Hotel v. City and Cnty. of San Francisco, 545 U.S. 323, 351 n. 2, 125 S. Ct. 2491, 162 L. Ed. 2d 315 (2005) (Rehnquist, C.J., concurring in the judgment). In Miles Christi Religious Order v. Township of Northville, 629 F.3d 533, 541 (6th Cir. 2010), we acknowledged that ripeness under Williamson County is only a “prudential requirement, and we need not follow it when its application would not accord with sound process.” (citation, internal quotation marks, and alterations omitted).
We need not determine whether the district court should have exercised jurisdiction to hear the prudentially unripe federal takings claims in this case, or indeed whether well-settled precedent made it objectively unreasonable for Pennfield to remove on the basis of federal tаkings claims that were not initially litigated in state court. In some unripe federal-takings-claim cases, to be sure, the exercise of federal jurisdiction was not objectively unreasonable. In Wilkins v. Daniels, 744 F.3d 409, 418 (6th Cir. 2014), we exercised federal-question jurisdiction to decide a federal takings claim on the merits even though the state-litigation requirement had not been satisfied because “it [was] clear that there has been no ‘taking.’ ” The Ninth Circuit reached a similar conclusion in Guggenheim v. City of Goleta, 638 F.3d 1111, 1118 (9th Cir. 2010) (en banc). The Fourth Circuit held in Sansotta v. Town of Nags Head, 724 F.3d 533, 545 (4th Cir. 2013) that the state-litigation requirement is not applicable where, as here, a municipality defendant removes on the basis of a federal takings claim. These cases demonstrate that, in some circumstances, a district court may have jurisdiction to hear a federal taking claim that fails to meet the state-litigation requirement for prudential ripeness under Williamson County. However, because Pennfield fails at the second step of thе inquiry, we need not resolve the question of whether this is such a case.
D
The district court retained discretion to award fees if it identified an “unusual circumstance” that justified departing from the objectively-reasonable-basis rule. Martin, 546 U.S. at 141. In exercising this discretion, the district court should aim to “deter removals sought fоr the purpose of prolonging litigation and imposing costs on the opposing party, while not undermining Congress’ basic decision to afford defendants a right to remove as a general matter, when the statutory criteria are satisfied.” Id. at 140.
Six days after removing the case to federal district court оn the basis of federal-question jurisdiction, Pennfield filed a motion to dismiss the case for lack of ripe
On appeal, Pennfield does not dispute that it knowingly removed on the basis of unripe claims that it did not believe the district court should hear. Instead, it makes the bold argument that “any delay in resolving the inverse condemnation action stemmed not from Defendant‘s choice to rеmove, but rather from [the Plaintiffs‘] decision to file unripe federal claims as part of [their] state court inverse condemnation action.” Appellant Br. at 13 (quoting Seiler v. Charter Twp., 53 F. Supp. 2d 957, 962 (E.D. Mich. 1999)).1 This argument is unpersuasive because the Supreme Court expressly rejected the “contention that Williamson County prohibits plaintiffs from advancing their federal [takings] claims in state courts.” San Remo, 545 U.S. at 346. In fact, the Court invited plaintiffs to litigate federal takings claims in state court because “state courts undoubtedly have more experience than federal courts do in resolving the complex factual, technical, and legal questions related to zoning and land-use regulations.” Id. at 347.2 “Michigan has long recognized the doctrine of inverse condemnation” as an available state-court remedy for federal takings claims. Bigelow v. Michigan Dep‘t of Nat. Res., 970 F.2d 154, 158 (6th Cir. 1992). The Plaintiffs properly filed their federal takings claims in Michigan state court as part of an inverse-condemnation action. It was Pennfield‘s choice to remove to federal court that brought these claims before a forum in which they were unripe. Therefore, Pennfield is responsible for ripeness-related delays.
We review the district court‘s finding of bad-faith motivation for clear error, and so wе would reverse only if the “decision strikes us as wrong with the force of a five-week-old, unrefrigerated dead fish.” United States v. Perry, 908 F.2d 56, 58 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 498 U.S. 1002 (1990) (quoting Parts & Elec. Motors, Inc. v. Sterling Elec., Inc., 866 F.2d 228, 233 (7th Cir. 1988), cert. denied, 493 U.S. 847 (1989)). If a district court chooses one of several permissible views of the evidence, its conclusion is not clearly erroneous. Anderson v. City of Bessemer City, 470 U.S. 564, 574 (1985).
Bad-faith motivation to remove for the purpose of prolonging litigation and imposing costs on the opposing party indisputably qualifies as an “unusual circumstance” that would justify the award of fees under
III. CONCLUSION
The district court did not abuse its discretion in finding that Pennfield removed the case for the bad-faith purpose of prolonging litigation, which justified the award of fees regardless of whether Pennfield had an objectively reasonable basis for removal. Accordingly, we AFFIRM the award of attorney‘s fees.