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89 Wash. 2d 369

572 P.2d 408

Keiffer v. King County

Washington Supreme Court

Decided December 15, 1977

Washington Supreme Court · decided 1977-12-15

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1977-12-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently January 2016

14 state decisions

5019771980199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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*375Dolliver, J.

¶1(dissenting)—Plaintiff Roy Keiffer's difficulty is not access; it is parking. For many years plaintiff used the public highway right-of-way in front of his premises as an extension of and adjunct to the parking area for his customers. So far as the record shows, no recompense by plaintiff was afforded to the citizens of King County for this use. When increased traffic required the duly authorized representatives of the people of King County to increase the highway from two to four lanes, a curb was constructed in front of plaintiff's property in the interests of public safety. Two driveway cuts were put in front of his property. The result of this has been increased convenience and safety for the traveling public and continued access to plaintiff's property, but an inability on the part of the plaintiff to continue to use for his private purposes what was formerly a public right-of-way and is now a busy paved highway.

¶2Plaintiff complains there is a taking because of the loss of access to his property. Plaintiff has not suffered loss of access; he has suffered the loss of public property for use as his private parking lot. Neither the state constitution, the federal constitution, the statutes, the common law of this state, nor sound public policy now require a dispensation from the public treasury for the benefit of the plaintiff. I dissent.

¶3Rosellini, J., concurs with Dolliver, J.

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