An Escambia County judge’s decision last year to effectively overrule a federal agency’s eviction moratorium during the height of the coronavirus pandemic has been vindicated by a Florida appeals court.
The First District Court of Appeal late last month affirmed district Judge Pat Kinsley’s 2020 order granting apartment complex owner Spicliff Inc.’s motion to lift a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directive that blocked the eviction of plaintiff Steven Cowley of Pensacola.
The CDC’s action was aimed at providing relief to those who could no longer afford to pay their rents due to COVID-19-related unemployment and stay-at-home orders.
Attorney Christine Kelly, senior attorney of the Legal Services of North Florida Inc., who represented Cowley, said the appeals court’s affirmation of the judge’s rejection of the eviction moratorium was not unexpected.
“I don’t think it’s a surprise that the court affirmed the judge’s decision because the U.S. Supreme Court found the CDC moratorium unconstitutional in August,” Kelly said in an email to the Florida Record.
But the specter of a district judge challenging a federal agency’s decree is not typical, she said.
“I believe it is fairly unusual for a state court to overrule a federal agency,” Kelly said. “When I did research for the appeal, I was unable to find any similar cases.”
Kinsley’s ruling in favor of the landlord’s rights is based on her characterization of the CDC’s order as a “taking” of private property in violation of the Fifth Amendment. Under the CDC’s moratorium provisions, a tenant needed only to fill out a preprinted form before a notary and present it to a landlord to delay rent payments.
“Neither the federal government nor state governments have the authority to force private citizens to ‘house’ persons in their private property without just compensation or due process of law,” she wrote in her order supporting Spicliff Inc.
Kinsley also described a scenario the federal agency could have taken that she said would have passed legal muster.
“A lawful alternative would have had tenants sign the pre-printed forms which, after notarization, would have been submitted to the CDC,” she said. “The CDC would have then had the rent paid by the federal government directly to landlords.”
In the Spicliff case, the plaintiff owed nearly $6,000 in rent to the landlord, with little likelihood that Cowley would be able to pay what he owed once the moratorium ended, according to Kinsley.