Eye On Illinois: Do courts have discretion when considering local ordinance enforcement?

You might not be paying close attention to the Illinois Supreme Court’s current docket, but your municipal officials likely locked in on oral arguments a week ago today.

The case, docketed as City of Rock Falls v. Aims Industrial Services, reached the top court following an October 2022 ruling of the Illinois Fourth District Appellate Court. Shaw Media’s Kathleen Schultz wrote an excellent, detailed analysis (available at tinyurl.com/SCOILLrockfalls) but the distilled version is simple:

Rock Falls has an ordinance requiring certain property owners to disconnect from private sewers in favor of the city system. In 2017, Aims bought land in Rock Falls but didn’t make a sewer connection because it said the city didn’t install lateral hookups as its ordinance requires. In 2019, Rock Falls asked a Whiteside County judge to fine Aims and issue a court order forcing the company to make the sewer connection.

The legal dispute is much deeper, and well worth exploring, but the question before the Supreme Court is whether the circuit judge had any discretion to consider the impact of the ordinance on a private business or whether it was bound to simply determine whether or not Aims complied.

Writing for the Fourth District, Justice Eugene Doherty said injunction seekers usually must establish there isn’t another legal remedy to preserve “a certain and clearly ascertainable right” and that, absent the injunction, there will be irreparable harm.

“However, where a governmental agency is expressly authorized by statute to seek injunctive relief, the traditional equitable elements necessary to obtain an injunction need not be satisfied,” Doherty wrote. “This rule is based on the presumption that harm to the public occurs when an ordinance is violated.”

Although Doherty’s opinion doesn’t explicitly state as much, the base layer of the presumption pyramid is the perceived prudence of any ordinance. It’s comparatively much easier to consider whether rule or law aligns with the state or federal constitution than whether something is sound public policy.

Aims argued it would’ve cost almost $160,000 to make the typical sewer connection or only $51,455 for an “unusual” method, and that it might not have bought the land if those costs were mandatory. But if Rock Falls feels strongly enough about that issue to impose requirements potentially complicating the sale of private industrial property, is it a judge’s place to say otherwise?

This is why other governments are watching. If the question of whether a local rule is fair, or if compliance is too costly, is subject to review after the elected officials already have had the debate, trial lawyers might be lined up looking to represent plaintiffs with bones to pick.

Such litigation evinces a healthy democracy willing to evaluate its own powers.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.