Leon v. City of Brighton

The issue in this case involved two landowners’ facial challenge to the constitutionality of 18-59 of the Brighton Code of Ordinances (BCO), which created a rebuttable presumption that an unsafe structure could be demolished as a public nuisance if it was determined that the cost to repair the structure would exceed 100 percent of the structure’s true cash value as reflected in assessment tax rolls before the structure became unsafe. Specifically, the issue before the Supreme Court in this case was whether this unreasonable-to-repair presumption violated substantive and procedural due process protections by permitting demolition without affording the owner of the structure an option to repair as a matter of right. As a preliminary matter, the Court clarified that the landowners’ substantive due process and procedural due process claims implicated two separate constitutional rights, and that each claim must be analyzed under separate constitutional tests. The Court of Appeals erred by improperly conflating these analyses and subsequently determining that BCO 18-59 facially violated plaintiffs’ general due process rights. When each due process protection was separately examined pursuant to the proper test, the Supreme Court found that the ordinance did not violate either protection on its face. View "Leon v. City of Brighton" on Justia Law