December 23, 2018
Subject: Legal action against Orem
city concerning solar panel permits
Fellow Orem residents,
Orem city records show that someone at
this address was denied a solar panel building permit within the last five
years. The city supplied only the address, not the names of the people
involved, or their telephone or e-mail contact information. That lack of
contact information is what makes this "dear resident" mailing
necessary to do a status check on the 250 Orem residents who had their solar
panel building applications denied.
If you are still interested in solar panels
please let us know at:
OremSolarPanels@gmail.com
It costs nothing right now to let us
know of your continuing interest in solar panels, but we may need to talk about
money later on.
Please include your telephone number
as well as verify your current mailing address. Some people may have moved
during the last five years, and their current mailing address may not be the
same as it was then. Also let us know if you would like to attend an open house
sometime in the near future.
I was one of those people who was
denied a solar panel building permit, in October 2017, and that is why I am
moving ahead with this lawsuit. Ideally, I can solve my personal problem while
solving the same kind of problem for 250 other people in Orem.
We would like to have an open house
sometime soon at our home in Orem where we could meet everyone who still has an
interest in installing solar panels, but has been prevented by city action.
Rather than pick a time for open house without any information right now, we
will wait to hear from some of the 250 residents we are contacting through this
mailing (with mailings of about 10 at a time). When we know the level of interest,
we will schedule some specific times. It may take more than one such open house
to allow us to meet everyone.
Also, since there will be some
expenses involved in going forward, with either 250 individual cases or one
consolidated or class-action suit, or some other clustering of cases, I ask you
to consider contributing some funds for legal processing at some point. If
everyone acted individually on their own case it could easily cost $100,000 for
each one, in a legal action that might very well fail, mostly because there is
no attorney in the state I can find who would do the necessary research as I
have done. And that $100,000 per permit would make no economic sense, since
probably the most that anyone can save by installing solar panels is about
$100,000 over the life of the panels. I assume most of you have already made
that computation (and decided to do nothing, or I might have heard from you
already). Hopefully there is a much cheaper way to do this, but it still won't
be free.
I am going to assume for the moment
that the costs of getting the permit from the city, even if it is $5000, or any
other significant number, could be counted as part of the cost of your solar
panel installation, with the federal government paying for 30% of it, or $1666,
and the state government adding in about $1600. That could turn $5000 into
$1734 after subtracting the government tax credits of $3266.
It would be useful to receive any
amount of money from each participant, according to their means and enthusiasm,
but just to complete the maximum computation for you for a dream scenario, if
every one of the 250 people each put in $5000 to this legal fund, that would
give us $1.25 million to work with. Surely that would be enough to solve the
problem, and, hopefully, all participants would get their solar panel permits
plus get some money back. I can see that the city and the judicial system are
going to be very stubborn in their resistance, but success is possible if we
are persistent.
As a simple way to put yourself at the
head of the list for receiving a permit, those who contribute the most money the
soonest will get preference. I hope you will feel that this is a project worth
pursuing.
If people put in smaller amounts or
delay those amounts, that will lower the enthusiasm and slow the pace of this
complicated legal process. If there are some who are willing to sign their name
agreeing to have an action brought in their name, that would be helpful, even
if they do not contribute any funds. Just the filing fee for starting the legal
process for one person is at least $360, plus another $200 if a jury is
requested. And this is before any attorney fees are included.
We hope we are nearly ready to move
quickly on the first $5000 contributor, hopefully being successful and starting
the ball rolling.
I hope to do these cases in groups of
10 and try to get a jury involved.
Incidentally, if someone is worried
about having too much money in one place in this case, they are welcome to help
act as a board of auditors.
Incidentally, I calculate power costs
3¢ per kilowatt hour for roof panels as opposed to the 8.84¢ or 11.54¢ or 14.45¢
charged by Rocky Mountain Power at different levels of consumption (mostly at
the 14.45¢ rate at my house). I think it
is very interesting that supplying your own power can make using an electric
car cost you only 1¢ a mile as opposed to the usual 15¢ a mile using gasoline
for power (1/3 kWh per mile electric power consumption).
I have already started a lawsuit of my
own, on September 6, 2018, hoping to join everyone together into a class-action
suit, but the courts are not being cooperative in what should be an obviously
efficient solution to the problem such as a class action, meaning that there
will probably be no quick and easy solution but instead it will be a hard slog
to get state judges to rule against a state subdivision such as a city which
collects all their taxes for them. I consider it a travesty that Orem is
ignoring essentially every constitutional and legal rule in the book in their
behavior, and they are not anxious to change that lawless behavior.
If you are anything like me, you can
just be angry that you "can't fight City Hall," or you can choose to
do something about it as part of a group.
Besides just getting the permits
issued, I see it as an important political process to discipline a seriously
misbehaving city, and this is one way to do it. It may be that the only real
solution is to replace the mayor and city manager and probably most of the city
councilmen before this ridiculous legal behavior on the part of the city can be
remedied. Some of this group of 250 people might turn out to be a group of
activists who can make the political change happen, either before or after this
legal challenge is completed.
I should mention that I have already
put in about 1000 hours of research on this topic, exploring the 12 to 15
constitutional, statutory, and ordinance-level legal errors the city has made
in enforcing its current policies. My case has progressed to the point where
the judge has denied, at least for the moment, class-action status for this
group. I don't intend to stop there, but I certainly do not have the resources
to go ahead with this action to its completion, including any possible appeals,
based strictly on my own personal resources, so this will necessarily be a
group effort. I did go to law school, but I am not licensed as an attorney in
Utah, and have never worked as a trial attorney, so I cannot do this all
myself, but will need to hire local attorneys to assist me. I can do a lot of
the research and theoretical work, but someone else is going to have to do the
practical work in court
I have created about 200 pages of documents
to support this case which are all on file at the Fourth District Court in
Provo. I can send them by e-mail to anyone who requests them, or perhaps I will
find a way to put them online where people can easily access them.
I am told that it is unlikely that
damages would be awarded in this case, and we'll see about that later, but here
is my estimate of what those damages ought to be: $2000 a year in lost savings
on electric power, and $1000 a year for those cases where people put a new roof
on their house, but were then unable to use it. That assumes that the roof is
deteriorating at a cost of $1000 a year on that otherwise unnecessary roof
upgrade. Every year or part of a year would trigger those amounts. In my case,
it would have been two years, putting me at the $6000 level. For those who have
been waiting for five years, that would put them at the $15,000 level.
I hope this answers many of your
questions.
Yours for better government,
Kent Huff
OremSolarPanels@gmail.com
kent.huff@gmail.com
Cell: 801-615-9032
139 West 1720 North
Orem, Utah 84057
Computer consultant, author, JD, LLM
