This put up was authored by Michael Eisenberg, Touro Regulation Coronary heart
The defendant owned 4 tons containing personal belongings along with scrap metal and automotive components for personal use. These things had been saved exterior and in sheds in a dilapidated scenario. The defendant had neither obtained a license to perform a junk yard nor a specific exception from town. The town sought injunctive discount to stop the defendant from working a junk yard and the extra imposition of civil penalties and the award of costs and lawyer’s expenses. The trial courtroom found that the defendant was definitely working or sustaining a junk yard in violation of RSA 236:114 and that his properties had been a nuisance. The defendant was ordered to abate the nuisance. The courtroom permitted town to impose a civil penalty of $50 for daily the defendant remained out of compliance earlier a determined date. However, the trial courtroom disregarded town’s petition to implement the native zoning ordinance, reasoning that the defendant ought to promote junk with a function to qualify as “working” a junk yard beneath the zoning ordinance and that the provides had been solely for the defendant’s personal use.
The trial courtroom’s statutory and zoning ordinance interpretation had been each reviewed de novo. The defendant argued on attraction that the trial courterred as a matter of regulation when making use of RSA 236:111-:129 to the defendant’s 4 non-business personal properties and indiscriminately constituting each as a junk yard nevertheless placement of issues on each property. The courtroom upheld the trial’s courtroom discovering primarily based totally on ample proof throughout the doc as to the distribution of junk on the respective properties. So too, beneath RSA 236:112, a junk yard needn’t be a place of job per se, nevertheless is also any “place” used to retailer junk. The defendant moreover argued that the subject parcels of land are inside New Hampshire’s restricted entry freeway system for I-93, and thus, RSA 236:90-:110 could be the “applicable” statutory subdivision to make use of. However, the courtroom affirmed that the provisions of RSA 236:111-:129 apply to all junk yards, along with these subject to regulation beneath RSA 236:90-110. The courtroom upheld the trial courtroom’s discovering that the zoning ordinance regulates “junk yards” as an “industrial use.” The storage of 1’s private personal belongings on one’s private property is not an “industrial use.”
Lincoln v Chenard, 2022 WL 166066 (NH 1/19/2022)