Imagine a scenario: a municipality’s actions—say, noise and vibrations from a city-owned airport—effectively “take” a neighboring property. The catch? The property owner lives in a different jurisdiction. The municipality that “took” the property argues it has no authority to appropriate land outside its own borders, so a court can’t possibly order it to do so. Therefore, the municipality argues, the property owner lacks standing because their injury isn’t “redressable.”
This was the “conundrum” presented in State ex rel. Boggs v. Cleveland. The lower courts agreed with the City of Cleveland, leaving the property owners with a constitutional right (just compensation) but no apparent remedy.
On Nov. 13, 2025, the Supreme Court of Ohio unanimously reversed, clarifying a critical—and previously muddled—point of law: The government’s duty to pay for a taking is independent of its authority to take.
Link to The facts and the procedural posture The facts and the procedural posture
Susan Boggs and Fouad Rachid live in a home in Olmsted Township, near the Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport. The airport is owned by the City of Cleveland and is located entirely within Cleveland’s city limits. Boggs alleged that airport operations, including low-flying planes, caused noise, vibrations, and fuel emissions that interfered with the use of her home to such an extent that it constituted a taking.
Boggs filed a mandamus action seeking a writ of inverse condemnation to compel Cleveland to institute appropriation proceedings. The trial court and the Eighth District Court of Appeals both held that Boggs lacked standing.
Their reasoning followed this path:
- Standing requires that an injury is “likely to be redressed by the requested relief”
- Under Ohio’s Home Rule, a municipality (Cleveland) generally lacks the constitutional or statutory authority to appropriate property outside its own corporate limits
- Because Cleveland had no authority to appropriate Boggs’s property in Olmsted Township, a court could not order Cleveland to do so
- Therefore, Boggs’s injury was not redressable and she lacked standing
This left Boggs in a classic “catch-22:” a victim of an alleged unconstitutional taking with no available remedy.
Link to The Supreme Court’s holding: Separating the duty to pay from the authority to take The Supreme Court’s holding: Separating the duty to pay from the authority to take
Writing for the court, Justice DeWine undid the lower courts’ logic by separating two distinct concepts that had been “conflated:” the power of eminent domain and the duty to pay just compensation.
The court held that Article I, Section 19 of the Ohio Constitution—which commands that “compensation shall be made to the owner” when private property is taken for public use—is an “unequivocal command.” This duty to pay is “self-executing” and applies regardless of how the property was taken.
The lower courts’ error, the Supreme Court explained, was “conflating these two principles.” The court stated it plainly:
“The principle that a municipality cannot use the power of eminent domain beyond its borders should not mean that a municipality does not have to follow the constitution’s command to pay just ‘compensation’ when its actions effect an extraterritorial taking of property.”
“Regardless of whether it was appropriate for the government to take a citizen’s property, the government still must pay him compensation when it has done so.”
In an inverse condemnation action, the “taking” has already happened. The mandamus action simply determines if a taking occurred; if it did, the subsequent appropriation proceeding is not about the authority to take but is simply the “mechanism” for a jury to determine the amount of compensation owed.
Link to Practice pointer: What happens to Clifton and Moore? Practice pointer: What happens to Clifton and Moore?
This decision is a significant development for practitioners, as it directly addresses—and limits—the court’s prior holdings in the 2012 decisions Clifton v. Blanchester and Moore v. Middletown . Both of those cases, which involved regulatory-takings claims against “foreign municipalities,” were used by the Boggs appellate court to deny standing.
The Supreme Court in Boggs did not overrule those cases, but it “cabined” them, stressing that both Clifton and Moore contained their own cautions limiting their holdings to their “unique facts and circumstances.”
The Boggs court refused to “extend Clifton and Moore beyond their ‘unique facts'” and issued a new, clear holding:
“…a person who alleges that his property has been taken by a foreign municipality may pursue a mandamus action to force the municipality to institute appropriation proceedings for purposes of compensating the landowner for property that has been taken.”
This holding effectively re-opens the courthouse doors for property owners who, especially in cases of alleged physical takings like noise, flooding or vibrations, were previously barred from suing a neighboring municipality.
Link to What’s next? What’s next?
The Supreme Court only decided the issue of standing. The case was remanded to the Eighth District to address Cleveland’s statute-of-limitations argument, which the court did not previously reach.
If Boggs prevails on that issue, the case will be remanded to the trial court for the main event: to determine, on the merits, whether Cleveland’s airport operations amounted to a legally cognizable taking of her property. The battle is far from over, but for Boggs and other similarly situated property owners, the battle can now be fought.