REAL ESTATE; HOSPITALS; EMINENT DOMAIN;

PROPERTY;

Connecticut laws/regulations;

You wanted to know what “contiguous” means within the context of a Connecticut statute providing a procedure through which nonprofit hospitals can acquire real property by eminent domain. You specifically wanted to know if the statute permits these hospitals to acquire property separated from them by a public street. The Office of Legislative Research cannot give legal opinions and you should not regard this report as one.

By law nonprofit hospitals can ask the Superior Court for permission to take property “contiguous” to property they own. A hospital must need the land and buildings to expand its facilities and the Office of Health Care Access must agree with that assessment. In response to the request, the court must appoint a committee of three disinterested people to determine if the hospital needs the property and assess the damages the taking would cause. The court may order the taking only if the committee concludes it is necessary. But the hospital cannot take the property until it pays the owner or deposits the amount with the court (CGS § 19a-645).

Although no Connecticut court has construed what “contiguous” means, it would likely do so based on the plain meaning of the word: “touching at a point or along a boundary; adjoining” (Black’s Law Dictionary (7^th edition, 1999)). Applying this definition to a case involving a hospital taking under this law, a court would probably conclude that a hospital could not acquire by eminent domain property separated from it

by a public street. Put another way, a court would likely conclude that the hospital could take only that property bordering or touching hospital property.

We based this conclusion on PA 03-154, which requires courts to determine a statute’s meaning from its text and relationship to other statutes before they search for that meaning in the statute’s legislative history and other nonstatutory sources. Consequently, a court cannot search for meaning outside of the text of a statute with words that are plan and unambiguous and do not yield absurd or unworkable results.

If applying the “plain meaning” rule to the hospital taking law would yield absurd or unworkable results, or render the terms ambiguous, a court would resort to other rules of statutory construction to determine legislative intent. This would likely involve the court in looking at the legislative history, the circumstances surrounding the law’s enactment, its relationship to other existing legislation, and common law principles governing the same general subject matter.

A review of the statute’s legislative history would reveal that the bill’s proponent meant “contiguous” to mean, “abutting. ” During the floor debate, the House adopted an amendment that substituted “contiguous” for “adjacent,” a change its proponent stated would “allow eminent domain to be exercised by the hospital only if the land it wishes to condemn is contiguous to the hospital building proper. Thus the hospital could not condemn property, for example, on the other side of the town” (House Proceedings, May 9, 1973, p. 5664).

JR: ro