SATCHER v. COLUMBIA COUNTY (And Vice Versa)

A group of property owners in Columbia County sued the county after decades of stormwater problems, including a metal drainage pipe that repeatedly failed and caused sinkholes and a collapsed parking lot. After sending the county a legal notice in October 2013 and filing suit in 2014, the owners won money damages and a permanent injunction from a trial court ordering the county to stop maintaining a defective stormwater system. The Court of Appeals of Georgia upheld the injunction but cut back some of the damages, and both sides asked the Supreme Court of Georgia to review different pieces of that ruling. The Supreme Court of Georgia held that the permanent injunction went beyond what the Georgia Constitution allows, because the state's limited waiver of a county's sovereign immunity (its usual legal shield from lawsuits) only permits a court to stop harm until the county pays fair compensation or formally exercises its power to take property, not to issue an open-ended permanent order. The court sent that part of the case back for a properly limited injunction. It also decided it had wrongly agreed to review the damages question, because the Court of Appeals's ruling on that point was narrow and fact-specific, not a broad legal rule.

The Just Compensation Provision of the Georgia Constitution waives a county's sovereign immunity for injunctive relief only long enough to stop a taking or damaging until the county pays just compensation or properly exercises eminent domain; a permanent injunction with no such limit exceeds that waiver and must be vacated and reconsidered.

The ruling limits how far Georgia courts can go in ordering counties and other governments to fix infrastructure problems like defective stormwater systems, requiring any such order to track the constitution's narrow exception to sovereign immunity. Local governments facing similar property-damage lawsuits get clearer limits on injunctive relief.

Judgment vacated in part and remanded; certiorari improvidently granted and petition denied in companion case

1. The court explained that sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine shielding governments from lawsuits unless immunity is waived, extends to counties and can only be waived by the state constitution or a statute that specifically says so.
2. Applying prior precedent (Mixon), the court noted that Georgia's Just Compensation Provision only waives sovereign immunity for injunctions in two narrow situations: when compensation must be paid first but hasn't been, or when the government hasn't formally exercised its power of eminent domain (the power to take private property for public use).
3. Because that waiver only allows a court to stop a taking or damaging until the government pays compensation or properly exercises eminent domain, an injunction with no time limit or condition for ending it goes beyond what the constitution permits.
4. The trial court's injunction permanently barred the county from maintaining a defective stormwater system with no mechanism for the county to end the injunction by paying compensation, so it exceeded the sovereign immunity waiver and could not stand as written.
5. The court rejected the county's broader argument that sovereign immunity barred any injunction at all, since the trial court's finding that a compensable taking or damaging occurred was not disturbed by the Court of Appeals of Georgia or within the scope of the certiorari grant.
6. On the separate damages question, the court found that the Court of Appeals of Georgia's ruling limiting recovery to harms before the property owners' 2013 notice letter was a fact-specific application of law to this case, not a general legal rule, so it did not meet the standard for Supreme Court review and had been improvidently granted.

• sovereign immunity
• stormwater drainage
• permanent injunction
• inverse condemnation
• Columbia County