WISE BUSINESS FORMS INCORPORATED v. FORSYTH COUNTY

Wise Business Forms owns land in Forsyth County under which a drainage pipe has run since 1985. When the county and the state widened McFarland Parkway in 2000, they built a new stormwater system that Wise says pushed far more water through that pipe. Wise did not notice any problem until a sinkhole opened on its property in June 2016, and further inspection that September revealed the pipe itself had eroded. Wise sued in 2020, but the trial court and the Court of Appeals of Georgia both threw out its permanent nuisance claim, reasoning that any harm from the drainage project would have been obvious back in 2000, so the four-year deadline to sue had long passed. The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed, holding that at the motion-to-dismiss stage the courts had to accept Wise's allegations that the real damage, the sinkhole and pipe erosion, stayed hidden until 2016. Because those harms were not obviously observable in 2000, the case must go back for further proceedings.

A permanent nuisance claim does not automatically expire four years after the nuisance is built if the plaintiff plausibly alleges that the actual physical harm to its property remained hidden and only became observable later, in which case the four-year deadline runs from when that harm was discoverable, not from construction.

The ruling gives Georgia property owners more room to sue over slow-developing damage from government construction projects, like drainage systems, roads, or pipelines, even years after the project was finished, so long as the actual harm stayed hidden until later.

Reversed and remanded with direction

1. The court explained that a nuisance is either 'abatable' (a minor, easily fixed problem) or 'permanent' (one that will likely continue indefinitely), and that classification affects when the four-year deadline to sue under Georgia's trespass-to-realty statute (O.C.G.A. § 9-3-30 (a)) starts running.
2. For permanent nuisances where the harm is immediately obvious when the structure or activity is created, like building a bridge or opening a polluting sewer, the deadline starts running as soon as the structure is completed, because the injury is 'original' and fully compensable at once.
3. But the court clarified that this immediate-harm rule does not cover every permanent nuisance case; where the harm only becomes observable later, sometimes because of a later event like heavy rain, a separate claim can arise when that specific injury occurs, and the deadline runs from that later discovery.
4. Applying Georgia precedent on continuing nuisances that will persist indefinitely, the court noted a property owner can either sue repeatedly for each new round of damage as it occurs, or file one lawsuit covering both past and all future harm; Wise chose the second approach.
5. Because the courts below were reviewing a motion to dismiss, they were required to accept Wise's factual allegations as true and resolve doubts in Wise's favor; Wise alleged the sinkhole and pipe erosion were not visible until 2016, not in 2000 when the road project finished.
6. The Court of Appeals of Georgia treated the increased stormwater flow as the only harm and assumed it was obviously observable in 2000, but it ignored Wise's separate allegations about the hidden sinkhole and pipe erosion, so dismissing the claim as time-barred at this early stage was error.

• inverse condemnation
• permanent nuisance
• statute of limitation
• sinkhole
• stormwater drainage