Courts To Decide Limits of Map Act | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Barry Smith, who is an associate editor for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

State highway officials can leave property in limbo


    RALEIGH     Hundreds of North Carolinians who own property in swaths of land that the N.C. Department of Transportation has staked out for highways are awaiting action in state courts.

    Their parcels of land have been in limbo, some for more than a decade, at least partly because of the DOT's use of the Map Act, which allows the department to prevent building permits from being issued on property listed in highway corridors.

    "It's shameful," said Matthew Bryant, an attorney representing several plaintiffs in Forsyth County against the DOT. "[The Map Act] probably impacts 1,500 to 2,000 landowners." Bryant and has asked the N.C. Court of Appeals to rule the Map Act unconstitutional.

    A March 2014 report by Tyler Younts, then the John Locke Foundation's legal policy analyst, concluded that the Map Act virtually freezes property development within proposed road corridors by blocking building permit and subdivision applications for up to three years. It also showed that North Carolina is one of only 13 states that have Map Act statutes.

    All other states with comparable statutes either allow property owners to demand immediate acquisition of their property or release from an official map, or the states place limits on the length of time an official corridor map can block building and subdivision applicants, with the limits ranging from 80 to 365 days.

    The JLF report concludes that the Map Act either should be repealed or shorten the time period for delaying building permits to between 80 and 120 days.

    Lawsuits attacking the Map Act or seeking to require the DOT to acquire affected property have been filed in a number of counties, including Cleveland, Cumberland, Forsyth, Guilford, Pender, and Wake.

    Bryant said that the law allows the DOT to prevent development on a property, freezing its value at the time of listing so that the state won't have to pay more when the land later is acquired.

    Calvin Leggett, the head of the DOT's program development branch, said the DOT has been administering the Map Act for more than 25 years. "I think, by and large, it has worked well," he said.

    He said the act only allows the DOT and local planners to deny a building permit for three years. He said that lowering the limit to 60 or 90 days, as some states do, would be meaningless, adding that the process for acquiring property usually takes longer than that.

    Leggett said he doesn't doubt that some properties have been in limbo for more than a decade.

    "But that is not a function of the Map Act," Leggett said. "That is a function of the planning process."

    Leggett said that the open planning process for highways discloses the parcels of land that could be affected if the DOT is considering new highway construction.

    "That knowledge is real," Leggett said. "It's not a misunderstanding or anything else. It's just us telling people what we think we're going to do."

    Leggett said he thought there was a lack of understanding of the administrative remedies under the Map Act. For instance, owners of vacant property in transportation corridors pay taxes based on 20 percent on the assessed value, he said.

    A property owner wanting to subdivide property could lead the DOT to purchase the property immediately because it's simpler for the DOT to buy one lot than multiple subdivided lots, he said.

    "If you're 85 years old and need to move into a nursing home and you have a hardship because to move into the nursing home you need to sell your home, we will purchase it," Leggett said.

    The Map Act could undergo a review during the 2015 session of the General Assembly.

    "The way it is currently structured, it is unfair, said state Sen. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth. "I definitely want to see something done. We're trying to find a way so that DOT can do what they need to do without tying it up for long periods of time."

    Krawiec, a real estate agent, said in the mid-1980s she was the listing agent for some of the properties that were affected by the Map Act. "We couldn't sell them then," Krawiec said. "As soon as DOT says we're considering a belt loop, the property is worthless for those folks."

    She said real estate agents are required to tell potential buyers that property is under consideration for condemnation by the DOT. "As a real estate professional, when you tell people that, they say, let's look at something else," Krawiec said.

    Krawiec said she thought that one year was more reasonable than three years for the Map Act to lock up property.

    Bryant said he's hoping the current lawsuits will result in the DOT being required to buy the land that has been in limbo for years. And he said he doesn't think the DOT needs a Map Act to build roads.

    "Our Highway Department was formed in 1915," Bryant said. "They built all our roads without this stupid Map Act through some of our biggest cities. It's just a lazy man's way of avoiding the Constitution and not paying just compensation."
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