Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Utah Law Review
Abstract
Congress enacted the massive 2021 Infrastructure law and to construct what President Biden calls the “most significant long-term investment in our infrastructure and competitiveness in nearly a century.” However, this unprecedented federal climate change infrastructure policy is eclipsed by municipal governments ’zoning out’ this sustainable infrastructure. Recent Supreme Court precedent upholding the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution reserves for each of 35,000 separate U.S. cities and towns exclusive control over what sustainable infrastructure will or will not be sited on their land. Hundreds of cities and town already have enacted ‘aesthetic’ zoning to prevent sustainable infrastructure, notwithstanding supposedly preemptive federal climate policy requiring expedited implementation of these renewable technologies.
This article analyzes local ‘aesthetic’ zoning laws constructing impassible bottlenecks to federally-mandated Biden sustainable Infrastructure. This article analyzes the Supreme Court’s most recent opinion and federal court precedent preventing the federal government from preempting local and state land-use regulation regarding nationally mandated sustainable infrastructure. This article analyzes each of the 50 states’ infrastructure siting laws: Concluding that 90 percent of U.S. states have not exercised state authority to preempt or override their local cities’ land-use controls.
Municipal governments now exercise final approval on, and veto over, siting the sustainable technology embodied in the Biden sustainable infrastructure law. This article designs 6 innovative alternative mechanisms within existing U.S. law to circumvent local ‘aesthetic’ zoning barricades now blocking sustainable infrastructure, to be available within the short time-frame of the 2035 net-zero carbon Biden infrastructure commitment.
First Page
65
Last Page
128
DOI
https://doi.org/10.26054/0d-6pth-heqw
Publication Date
2023
Recommended Citation
Steven Ferrey, Flipped Constitutional Supremacy: Inferior Local Law Blocking Federal Policy, 2023 ULR 65 (2023).
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License