In Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, the U.S. Supreme Court signaled that governmental agencies must show that all conditions they impose on land use applications that require an applicant to spend money have an "essential nexus" to a legitimate governmental interest, and that the conditions be "roughly proportional" to the impact they are intended to offset.1 This holding has broad implications for both applicants proposing development projects and the agencies that review their proposals. This article discusses how Koontz affects the critical operative component of the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA)—i.e., the determination of mitigation measures for a project's potentially significant adverse environmental impacts.
'Koontz' in Context
The Supreme Court previously established that the governmental authority to exact conditions from land use applicants involving physical restrictions on real property—such as through conservation easements—is circumscribed by the Fifth Amendment right to "just compensation," and the Fourteenth Amendment (which makes the Bill of Rights applicable to the states).2 In Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, the Supreme Court held that there must be an "essential nexus" between a "legitimate state interest" and the condition that the reviewing agency seeks to impose.3 Accordingly, the Nollan court held that an agency's conditioning of a permit on an applicant's grant of an easement allowing the public to cross over the applicant's beachfront in order to go between two public beaches separated by the site had no "essential nexus" to the agency's purported concern that the project would cause a visual barrier to the ocean.
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