Settlement reportedly near in Tahoe land dispute

Thursday, April 22, 1999 | 9:45 a.m.

A lawyer for Bernadine Suitum said the tentative settlement calls for the TRPA to pay Suitum $600,000 to compensate her for regulations that prevented her from building a home on an 18,300-square-foot plot of land at Incline Village.

The agency in February had offered to settle the case for $305,000.

"For the first time ever, the TRPA is being forced to compensate a person for depriving that person of any economic use of their property," Reno lawyer Pat Cashill told the Reno-Gazette Journal. "It's a major victory for property owners."

Bernadine and John Suitum bought the lot on Tahoe's northeast shore in 1971 for $5,000 with dreams of building their retirement home. Over the years, homes were built all around their lot, before tough restrictions were imposed to try to save the lake from silting caused by construction erosion.

Her husband died in 1982 and Suitum didn't pick up the plans for several years. In 1989, she submitted plans for an A-frame to the planning agency, but was told her property was in a "stream environment zone" where all private building is barred.

TRPA said she could participate in a complicated plan under which landowners not allowed to build can sell "transferable development rights" to other people who want to build larger houses than regulations allow. The people who buy the rights can build their big homes, while the undeveloped lots are left vacant and erosion is limited.

Suitum sued in 1991, claiming the agency's denial of a building permit amounted to a taking of her property that required she be paid. But a trial judge and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against her, saying she had not tried to sell the development credits for compensation and therefore her lawsuit was premature.

But in 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court said the lower courts were wrong and remanded the case back to federal court in Reno for trial.

TRPA lawyer John Marshall would not comment on the settlement to be considered Wednesday by the bistate agency's governing board.

Suitum, now 84 and legally blind, lives in the Sacramento area and is thrilled with the proposed settlement, Cashill said.

"I think her single worst regret is that she never had the chance to enjoy the property with her grandchildren," he said.