Cite as: 520 U. S. 725 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
A
In holding Suitum's claim to be unripe, the Ninth Circuit agreed with the agency's argument that Suitum had failed to obtain a final and authoritative decision from the agency sufficient to satisfy the first prong of Williamson County, supra. Although it is unclear whether the agency still urges precisely that position before this Court, see, e. g., Brief for Respondent 21 (conceding that "[w]e know the full extent of the regulation's impact in restricting petitioner's development of her own land"), we think it important to emphasize that the rationale adopted in the decision under review is unsupported by our precedents.
Agins v. City of Tiburon, 447 U. S. 255 (1980), is the first case in which this Court employed a notion of ripeness in declining to reach the merits of an as-applied regulatory takings claim.9 In Agins, the landowners who challenged zon-that "the position of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency is that they do not . . . have provisions for paying just compensation," Tr. of Oral Arg. 4, thus suggesting that the agency is not subject to inverse condemnation proceedings, and the agency's counsel did not disagree. Suitum's position therefore appears to be that the sole remedy against the agency for a taking without just compensation is a § 1983 suit for damages, such as she has brought here. Cf. Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, 911 F. 2d 1331, 1341-1342 (CA9 1990). We leave this matter to the Court of Appeals on remand.
9 Two years earlier, in Penn Central Transp. Co. v. New York City, 438 U. S. 104 (1978), we reached the merits of Penn Central's claim that the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission's denial of permission to construct an office building on top of Grand Central Terminal was a taking, despite our observation that "it simply cannot be maintained, on this record, that appellants have been prohibited from occupying any portion of the airspace above the Terminal. While the [City's] actions in denying applications to construct an office building in excess of 50 stories above the Terminal may indicate that it will refuse to issue a certificate of appropriateness for any comparably sized structure, . . . [t]he [City has] emphasized that whether any construction would be allowed depended upon whether the proposed addition 'would harmonize in scale, material, and character with [the Termi-
735
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