Always Shoot Straight: Agencies Must Strictly Comply with All Procedural Requirements

In homage to the upcoming season, I am writing the 12 Days of Eminent Domain, highlighting a dozen of my favorite eminent domain decisions. Third, an 1876 Michigan opinion requiring exact compliance with procedural rules.

In Detroit Sharpshooters' Ass'n v Hamtramck Hwy Com'rs, 34 Mich 36, 37 (1876), the Supreme Court determined that all procedural steps had not been taken in an effort to “lay out a highway.”  Specifically, the commissioners in charge of the project were required to “issue” a “notice” to “convene a board” within five days but waited a month and were required to provide notice to owners and occupants but did not do so. The proceedings to lay out the highway were quashed because it “is well settled, that in all cases where the property of individuals is sought to be condemned for the public use by adverse proceedings, the laws which regulate such proceedings must be strictly followed, and especially that every jurisdictional step, and every requirement shaped to guard the rights and interests of parties whose property is meant to be taken, must be observed with much exactness.”

I have always liked this case because it both confirms an important legal principle and allows me, as a collegiate history major, to assert that this requirement has been well settled since the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (something that I have done in every brief that I have written citing the case).  The strict compliance standard was most recently cited in a published opinion that I obtained, Bd of Cnty. Rd Commissioners for Cnty. of Washtenaw v Shankle, 327 Mich App 407 (2019), which relied upon it when holding that “[b]ecause a good-faith written offer is a necessary condition precedent to invoking the trial court's jurisdiction in condemnation proceedings under the UCPA, the failure to tender a statutorily compliant good-faith written offer to all fee owners and any other owners of interests in the properties rendered the trial court without subject-matter jurisdiction over the action.”