An Illinois Supreme Court decision announced Friday will free millions of dollars in road-building funds that had been locked up in a legal dispute between DuPage County and a Schaumburg-based home builder.
The state high court ruled that Sundance Homes Inc. and others waited too long before filing an unusual class-action lawsuit in 1996, seeking a refund of nearly $6.2 million in highway impact fees they had paid in 1989 and 1990.
“The door is closed in this instance,” Chief Justice Moses W. Harrison II wrote.
County government in DuPage collects transportation impact fees from developers for the road improvements to accommodate traffic from new homes and businesses.
Impact fees of $480 to $510 were paid on typical homes in 1989 and 1990, according to lawyers for the county.
The ruling should free more than $7.2 million, with interest, held in escrow since March 1998.
At issue before the high court was the intent of language in an earlier decision that had invalidated a 1987 state law allowing DuPage and other large counties to impose impact fees.
Ruling in 1995 in a separate lawsuit brought against DuPage by the Northern Illinois Home Builders Association, the state Supreme Court indicated that impact fees collected under the 1987 law should be refunded. But in the same decision, the court upheld a later version of the law, and there has been no dispute over impact fees the county has collected since mid-1990.
In keeping with the 1995 ruling, DuPage paid refunds amounting to less than $100,000.
Though it was not a party to the earlier litigation, Sundance Homes and the others argued the county also should refund fees they had paid in 1989 and 1990.
Lawyers for DuPage objected, contending the lawsuit brought on behalf of Sundance Homes by Wheaton lawyer Joseph Laraia should have been dismissed under statute-of-limitations rules because it was filed more than five years after the impact fees were paid.
In 1997, then-DuPage County Circuit Judge Robert Byrne disagreed and ordered the county to pay refunds to home builders and developers whose claims could be documented.
Laraia had contended that Sundance Homes and the others could not have sought refunds until after the state Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that the earlier version of the law was constitutionally flawed. He also argued that the court intended to order the repayment of all impact fees collected in 1989 and 1990.
Not so, Harrison wrote.
“We did not state, nor did we intend to imply, that our judgment requires the County of DuPage to refund impact fees paid by non-parties [to the Northern Illinois Home Builders Association litigation],” Harrison wrote.
The decision upholds an earlier ruling by an Illinois Appellate Court panel.
