Despite two court rulings against the town, Cary has appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court over an illegal ordinance the town imposed on home builders and developers, which required the companies to help fund schools in order to get approval for a project. Cost to the taxpayer so far: $350,000. The town also has not yet refunded about $1 million to those they subjected to the illegal ordinance. Check out what the former town manager has to say about it in this Cary News story: (emphasis is mine)
The town’s persistence also led former town manager Bill Coleman to ask council members why they were pursuing a case Cary had already lost twice.
“You will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending an ordinance that was illegal from the beginning and the manner in which Council chose to enforce it was arbitrary and capricious,” Coleman wrote in an e-mail last month. “You were told this from the outset, but chose to ignore it. Now, the citizens of Cary end up paying that bill.”
The case is just one of 11 legal battles the town is now involved in. The story says many of them are due to Cary’s land use and sign ordinances. Cost to taxpayers so far: $2.7 million since July 2008.