Glickert v. Loop Trolley Transp. Dev. Dist., No. 14-2272 (8th Cir. 2015)
Annotate this CasePursuant to the Missouri Transportation Development District Act (Mo. Rev. Stat. 238.200), St. Louis City and University City passed resolutions and filed a petition, seeking to create the proposed District to build a trolley-car rail system and to fund the project by imposing up to a one percent sales tax on retail sales in the proposed District. Notice was published in two newspapers for four weeks. No one opposed the proposal or sought to join the suit. In 2007, the court found that the proposal neither illegal nor unconstitutional and certified a ballot question for registered voters residing or owning property within the proposed District. Voters approved the ballot question and, in 2008, the court entered final judgment. The sales tax was imposed and has been paid and collected since 2008. In 2013, plaintiffs sought a declaratory judgment that the District was not lawfully created and a permanent injunction barring the District from building and operating the trolley-car system. The district court dismissed some plaintiffs for lack of standing and granted the District summary judgment on another claim as precluded by state judgment. The Eighth Circuit affirmed, rejecting a plaintiff’s claim that he did not receive constitutionally adequate notice of the state lawsuit.
Court Description: Shepherd, Author, with Murphy, Circuit Judge, and Brooks, District Judge] Civil case - Civil Procedure. In action challenging the construction and operation of a trolley-car system in St. Louis and University City, Missouri, the district court did not err in dismissing plaintiffs' due process and equal protection claims without affording them an opportunity to supply more particularized allegations to establish their standing as they did not submit a motion to amend or a proposed amendment and did not indicate what a proposed amended pleading might have contained; nor did the court err in finding plaintiffs lacked standing to assert equal protection and due process claims because these claims were not an assertion of their own legal rights; a fourth plaintiff who actually owned property in the proposed trolley development district had publication notice of a related law suit in state court and was bound by it; claim that the notice was constitutionally defective was not raised in the district court and the argument was waived.
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