Church of Our Savior v. City of Jacksonville Beach

108 F.Supp.3d 1259

CHURCH OF OUR SAVIOR, formerly known as Resurrection Anglican Church, Inc., a Florida Nonprofit Corporation, Plaintiff,

v.The CITY OF JACKSONVILLE BEACH, a Florida Municipal Corporation, Defendant.

Case No. 3:13–cv–1346–J–32JBT.

United States District Court, M.D. Florida, Jacksonville Division.

Signed May 19, 2015.

Charles L. Stambaugh, Stambaugh & Associates, PA, Jacksonville, FL, Daniel P. Dalton, Katharine Elizabeth Brink, Dalton & Tomich, PLC, Detroit, MI, for Plaintiff.

Dale A. Scott, Michael J. Roper, Bell & Roper, PA, Orlando, FL, for Defendant.

ORDER

TIMOTHY J. CORRIGAN, District Judge.

On November 25, 2014, the Court entered Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law (Doc. 116) ruling that the City of Jacksonville Beach had violated the Equal Terms provision of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc, when it refused to grant the Church of Our Savior a conditional use permit ("CUP") to construct a church. 69 F.Supp.3d 1299. The Court then proceeded to the remedy phase. Trying to fashion the least intrusive remedy consistent with the RLUIPA violation it had found, the Court stated its intention to direct the City to grant a CUP but to allow the City to consider "reasonable conditions on the permit in accordance with the [City's Land Development Code ("LDC") ] and subject to its procedures." (Doc. 116 at 45.) The Court directed the parties to attempt to work together to identify appropriate conditions. Rather than do so, however, the parties chose to engage in unnecessarily contentious litigation on topics like how and where they should negotiate on possible conditions, what they should or should not be permitted to say in court filings, the correctness of the Court's original decision, the appropriate remedy, and the amount of attorneys' fees and costs to which the Church's attorneys are entitled.

In light of this impasse, on February 17, 2015, after a teleconference with the parties a week earlier (Doc. 144), the Court entered an Order directing the City to grant the Church a CUP containing any reasonable conditions no later than March 25, 2015 (Doc. 145). The City Planning Commission held a meeting on March 9, 2015, at which time it issued the CUP with certain conditions. (Doc. 164–2.)

On April 10, 2015, the Court conducted a hearing on three issues: the City's motion for reconsideration of the Court's original ruling finding the City to be in violation of the Equal Terms provision of RLUIPA,¹ the Church's objections to some of the conditions imposed by the City on the CUP, and the Church's motion for attorneys' fees and costs. (Doc. 184.) The Court now addresses each of these issues and proceeds to entry of final judgment.

I. THE CITY'S MOTIONS FOR RECONSIDERATION

A court may only grant a motion for reconsideration if it is based on "newly-discovered evidence or manifest errors of law or fact."² Arthur v. King, 500 F.3d 1335, 1343 (11th Cir.2007). Motions for reconsideration should be viewed with caution and granted only sparingly. United States v. Bailey, 288 F.Supp.2d 1261, 1267 (M.D.Fla.2003). "[A] motion for reconsideration is not a substitute for an appeal," and " ‘cannot be used to relitigate old matters, raise argument or present evidence that could have been raised prior to the entry of judgment.’ " Chesnut v. Ethan Allen Retail, Inc., 17 F.Supp.3d 1367, 1370 (N.D.Ga.2014) (quoting Michael Linet, Inc. v. Village of Wellington, Fla., 408 F.3d 757, 763 (11th Cir.2005) and citing Jacobs v. Tempur–Pedic Int'l, Inc., 626 F.3d 1327, 1344 (11th Cir.2010) ). Instead, reconsideration may be justified on one of three grounds: "(1) an intervening change in controlling law; (2) the availability of new evidence; and (3) the need to correct clear error or manifest injustice." Stalley v. ADS Alliance Data Sys., Inc., 296 F.R.D. 670, 687 (M.D.Fla.2013) (quotations omitted). Simply moving for reconsideration in the hope the court will change its mind, however, is inappropriate. Bryan v. Murphy, 246 F.Supp.2d 1256, 1259 (N.D.Ga.2003).

The City's motion essentially argues that if the City had known the Court was going to rule against it on Count III, the as-applied Equal Terms challenge, it would have paid more attention to that count at trial and in its earlier briefing. Half of the motion for reconsideration is given over to the City's collection and review of twelve cases it had not previously cited that it now contends are important for the Court's consideration. The second half of the motion endeavors to more clearly differentiate the circumstances of the Church and Discovery Montessori School than the City had in its motions for summary judgment, at trial, or in its proposed findings of fact. The City also asserts that its motion and the chart attached thereto rely only on evidence that was introduced at trial, none of which the Church actually disputes.

The motion for reconsideration is due to be denied. Though the City resists the charge, even when viewed in the most charitable light, the motion is a do-over, an attempted second bite at the apple. The City acknowledges there is no newly-discovered evidence³ and points to no intervening change in controlling law since the Court issued its Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law. Instead, the City tries to more fully present the law and the facts than it did originally, under the guise of helping the Court avoid a supposedly manifest error. Consistent with the standard of review for motions for reconsideration, the Court need not devote much space here to restating the bases for its original ruling, but will only briefly address the arguments raised in the motion to the extent necessary to assure itself no manifest error has been made. Giving the City every possible consideration, the Court also engaged in a full discussion of the motion for reconsideration with the City's counsel during the April 10, 2015 hearing. (See Doc. 184.)

The Court does not understand the City to suggest any legal error in the Court's ruling. After previously supplying no standard for deciding whether a comparator was "similarly situated" for an as-applied Equal Terms challenge, the City now agrees in the motion with the standard identified by the Court that, after close review of the circumstances of the projects, the comparator must be identical to the project in question "for all relevant purposes." (See Doc. 116 at 35 (citing Campbell v. Rainbow City, Ala., 434 F.3d 1306 (11th Cir.2006) ).) The Courts interprets the City's lengthy review of cases from outside the Eleventh Circuit (mostly Equal Protection cases) as its effort to glean relevant characteristics for the analysis and to muster examples showing that proving projects are identical is a heavy burden. An observation less explicit in the City's motion, but that the Court takes from these cases, is that the analysis is inherently fact-driven and that care should therefore be taken in extrapolating from one case to another.

Many of the cases upon which the City now belatedly attempts to rely are not RLUIPA cases, but involve claims with an intentional discrimination element. Such cases are not particularly useful in an Equal Terms challenge under RLUIPA where the Church "need not further show that the City was motivated by discriminatory animus or intent. Put another way, if the City treated the Church unequally to a similarly situated, non-religious assembly or institution, the Church need not prove why the City did so." (Doc. 116 at 27.)

In arguing that the Church's proposed use of the property as a church is not "similarly situated" enough to the private school the Court used as a comparator, the City overlooks another important aspect of an Equal Terms challenge under RLUIPA that differentiates it from other types of cases that require similarly situated comparators. In a more typical discrimination case, the comparator and the subject must be aligned in all material respects before they will be deemed to be similarly situated. In this as-applied Equal Terms challenge under RLUIPA, however, the most obvious comparator—another church—is no comparator at all. Rather, the comparison must be between a "religious assembly or institution," such as the proposed church, and a "non-religious assembly or institution." 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc(b)(1) (emphasis added). It is within this framework—where the Church and the secular comparator are necessarily dissimilar in some respects—that the Court must determine whether "the comparator is identical for all relevant purposes." (Doc. 116 at 35 (citing Campbell, 434 F.3d at 1314 ).) For the reasons stated in the Finding of Facts and Conclusions of Law, the Court has determined that Discovery Montessori School is a valid secular comparator under RLUIPA. (Doc. 116 at 37–41.)

The motion does not appear to contest the factual findings that led the Court to this conclusion. Instead, the City contends the Court erred in applying the above legal standard to those findings when it held the Church and the Discovery Montessori School to be identical in all relevant aspects. The City identifies a number of allegedly "significant differences" between the Church and Discovery Montessori School that it contends make them less than identical.⁴ The Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law reflect that the Court has already considered these aspects of the projects, however, and either found them not significant or disagreed with the City's present characterization. But a party's disagreement with the Court is not the same as finding a manifest error in its reasoning requiring reconsideration. See Madura, 851 F.Supp.2d at 1296. The Court adheres to its reasoning, the City has not identified any manifest error, and the Court therefore determines that the City's motion for reconsideration is due to be denied.

II. THE CHURCH'S OBJECTIONS TO THE CONDITIONAL USE PERMIT

In its Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law, the Court advised the parties that it...