Loch View, LLC v. Windham

Syllabus

Pursuant to statute ((Rev. to 2009) § 12-65b), a municipality may enter into an agreement with a property owner to fix the assessment of real property for a set period of time, permitting the development of such property without the increased taxes that might otherwise result from such improvement, provided the cost of improvements to the property is not less than $3 million. The defendant town appealed and the plaintiff property owner cross appealed from the trial court's judgment holding that the plaintiff had breached the tax fixing agreement that the parties had entered into pursuant to § 12-65b by failing to meet the final of three financial benchmarks set forth therein and that the town had breached the agreement by exceeding the scope of its contractual remedy. The town claimed, inter alia, that the court improperly relied on capital expenditures incurred by the plaintiff prior to the execution of the agreement in determining that the plaintiff met the first two financial benchmarks, and the plaintiff claimed that the court improperly rejected its appeal pursuant to statute (§ 12-119) from the town's valuation of the subject property on the 2014 grand list. Held: The trial court properly considered amounts that the plaintiff had spent on capital improvements prior to the execution of the agreement in determining that the plaintiff had met the agreement's first two financial benchmarks, as the court found that the parties' purpose in creating the agreement was to incentivize the plaintiff to invest $3 million in the subject property by a set date and that the purpose of the benchmarks was to ensure that the plaintiff was progressing toward that goal. The trial court properly concluded that the limitation of remedies provision in the agreement permitted the town to assess the property retroactively only for the final year covered by the agreement and such construction of the agreement did not run counter to the requirements of § 12-65b, as the scope of the stat