{"id":6644,"date":"2020-06-05T21:16:54","date_gmt":"2020-06-06T02:16:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?p=6644"},"modified":"2020-08-04T09:57:13","modified_gmt":"2020-08-04T14:57:13","slug":"words-of-obligation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?p=6644","title":{"rendered":"Words of Obligation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our Township recently came across a provision in the Zoning Regulations that stipulated that, upon receipt of a request, the board <em>shall<\/em> approve said request. The county prosecutor&#8217;s office advised them that this phrasing means they <em>must<\/em> approve the request. Now, that&#8217;s a risk mitigation decision, not a purely legal one. If they <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> approve the request, they <em>could<\/em> end up in court arguing over the meaning of the word &#8220;shall&#8221;. Gutierrez de Martinez v. Lamagno 515 U.S. 417 (1995), as an example, indicates it&#8217;s not apt to be a losing case. But &#8230; our County Prosecutor&#8217;s office is quite circumspect and very cautious. You <em>could<\/em> argue that shall is not a word of obligation. But you could also replace &#8216;shall&#8217; with &#8216;must&#8217; or &#8216;may&#8217; in your text and avoid any question. Given that the ordinances can be changed, the only down side to eliminating ambiguous language is time.<\/p>\n<p>Last night, we attended a meeting where they discussed the proposed new language to avoid <em>needing<\/em> to rubber-stamp every submission. And &#8230; the new text is riddled with the word <em>shall<\/em>. When a request is submitted for a special event permit, the request shall, provided the requestors have addressed this list of considerations, be approved. I brought up the scenario where multiple requests are received for the same area for the same time-period. Each individual event has sufficiently managed crowds, parking, noise, health and safety facilities, etc. But <em>in toto<\/em> three Independence Day special events within a quarter mile of each other creates a traffic concern. Or twelve Memorial Day special events across the township will strain emergency response resources. They need the flexibility to say &#8220;sorry, you&#8217;re the fifth guy who wants to do something this weekend &#8230; no&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our Township recently came across a provision in the Zoning Regulations that stipulated that, upon receipt of a request, the board shall approve said request. The county prosecutor&#8217;s office advised them that this phrasing means they must approve the request. Now, that&#8217;s a risk mitigation decision, not a purely legal one. If they don&#8217;t approve &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[1077],"class_list":["post-6644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-government","tag-legal-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6644"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6645,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6644\/revisions\/6645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}