Utah Court of Appeals
2024 UT 17 (click for full text of opinion)
The Utah Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a landowner’s challenge to a city’s incorporation, holding that there was no private right of action to enforce the incorporation code’s requirements.
After the City of Erda was incorporated, several Landowners within the newly incorporated boundaries challenged the incorporation under the Utah Declaratory Judgment Act, alleging certain statutory violations in the incorporation process, and naming Erda and the Lieutenant Governor—who certified its incorporation—as defendants in the suit. Both Erda and the Lt. Governor moved to dismiss, but the district court denied the motion. The defendants then appealed, and the Utah Supreme Court reversed and held that the landowner’s requested relief must be dismissed.
The Landowners had urged the lower court to allow their claim to proceed, contending that the incorporation code gives them certain rights in the incorporation process (right to sign or refuse to sign, request a feasibility study, etc.), and that while Utah law did not expressly state a mechanism for them to challenge Erda’s incorporation, they argued that certain provisions recognized the possibility that an incorporation could be challenged. The district court agreed, and ruled that because the incorporation code was silent about who may challenge an incorporation, the traditional standing test applied, which it concluded the landowners had met.
On appeal, however, the Utah Court of Appeals disagreed, looking to the plain language of the incorporation code, and finding that in absence of any explicit language conferring upon landowners–or upon any class of parties–a right to sue for violations of the incorporation code, the Court would not infer that the legislature intended to create a new statutory right of action in such an oblique way. As for any references in the code’s language about “challenges” to the petition, the Court concluded that this language refers to challenges based on pre-existent legal rights, such as constitutional claims or common law rights not preempted by the incorporation code. A declaratory judgment action is non-justiciable if the plaintiff lacks a protectable legal interest in the controversy. Because the landowners did not fall within the class of parties that the legislature authorized to file suit to enforce the statutory scheme, they lacked a protectible legal interest in the controversy and could not rely on the declaratory judgment act for relief.
