Land owners who sued the N.C. Department of Transportation over proposed highway corridors and won at the N.C. Court of Appeals will have to wait a few more months for their case to be settled.

The N.C. Supreme Court has agreed to hear NCDOT’s appeal of the case involving North Carolina’s Map Act.

“We understand that this is an important case,” said Matthew Bryant, a Winston-Salem attorney handling the case for the plaintiffs. “It began in September 2010. We sit here five years later, close to a resolution.”

The Map Act allows NCDOT to prevent building permits from being issued on property listed in highway corridors.

The case on appeal involves a lawsuit filed by property owners in Forsyth County. However, similar lawsuits regarding the Map Act have been filed in Guilford, Wake, Cleveland, Cumberland, and Pender counties.

Chief Judge Linda McGee wrote the opinion by a unanimous three-judge Court of Appeals panel. McGee said that by recording a corridor map, NCDOT foreshadows which properties eventually will be taken to build a road.

“We conclude that the Map Act empowers NCDOT with the right to exercise the state’s power of eminent domain and take private property of property owners affected by, and properly noticed of, a transportation corridor map that was recording in accordance with the procedures set forth in [state law],” McGee wrote. That power, “when exercised, requires the payment of just compensation,” she said.

Bryant said that time is the enemy of the plaintiffs and the friend of the DOT.

“The vast majority are old,” Bryant said of his clients. “They’re getting less and less able to take care of themselves… They shouldn’t have to be stressed out about this in their golden years.”

“Mr. [Everette] Kirby is 82 and his wife is 85,” Bryant said. The Kirbys are the lead plaintiffs in the case. Another elderly plaintiff has died, Bryant added.

“Nobody wants to be in the legal system for five, six, seven, eight years,” Bryant said.

An NCDOT spokesman did not want to comment on the appeal, instead referring questions to the state Attorney General’s office, which also did not comment.

Bryant said he was not surprised that the Supreme Court decided to take up NCDOT’s appeal of the case. Since the Court of Appeals opinion was unanimous, the Supreme Court was not obligated by law to take it up.

“We always knew we would be at the Supreme Court,” Bryant said.

Rep. Rayne Brown, R-Davidson, who has sponsored a bill to repeal the state’s Map Act, said she was disappointed that the Supreme Court chose to hear the appeal.

“I know that people continue to suffer,” Brown said. “I think the appeals court is exactly right. It’s absolutely a taking from the time the map is filed. [Land owners] lose all control of their property.”

Brown’s bill unanimously passed the House earlier this year, but has not been taken up in the Senate, and Brown said it probably will not be.

“The Senate is a nonstarter,” Brown said.

After the February Court of Appeals decision, Bryant said that the ruling could result in affected property owners receiving hundreds of millions of dollars for their property.

In March 2014, a report by Tyler Younts, then the John Locke Foundation’s legal policy analyst, concluded that the Map Act virtually freezes development within proposed road corridors by blocking building permit and subdivision applications for up to three years. Only 13 states, including North Carolina, have Map Act statutes.

The report concluded that the Map Act either should be repealed, or the time period for delaying building permits should be shortened to between 80 and 120 days.

Department of Transportation representatives have said that many of the effects on property owners come from the state’s open process for planning roads, and not necessarily from the Map Act itself. For example, they say knowing that a property is in a future highway corridor could lower the value of the property and make it difficult to sell.

Bryant said that attorneys likely would file their briefs this fall, and his clients hope the Supreme Court will hear the case early next year.

Barry Smith (@Barry_Smith) is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.