Williams Working With Bailey On New Right-Of-Way Bill

Representative Ryan Williams is collaborating with Senator Paul Bailey on a new right-of-way bill

Williams said that they are exploring legislation that would have local planning and zoning departments do Nollan-Dolan testing on right-of-ways. He said that it helps cities and counties understand how much of right-of-way is necessary and whether it should be at the local government’s expense.

“Developers designate or dedicate right-of-way as which they should for new developments,” “But sometimes in the instance where the land-use doesn’t change, citizens would buy property and would have to immediately give up additional right-of-way without compensation.”

Williams said that the two originally filed the bill about two years ago, but that it did not receive much local support citing that it was a property owner’s rights issue. He said that after getting the recommendation of Nollan-Dolan testing from the state’s Intergovernmental Relations Commissions (TACIR), they feel they’ve reached a fair compromise.

“We’ve got a caption bill that we filed in order to do this,” Williams said. “The draft report for TACIR has come out, I sit on TACIR at the will of the speaker and we have a pretty clear direction on what we have to do there. Dr. Lippard with TACIR, who’s the director TACIR, and his staff did years of research and is making this suggestion. We feel like it’s a good suggestion, but we’re using the next several weeks to study the five other states who have adopted the Nollan-Dolan testing to see which model would be best suited for our situation.”