Land compensation for joint facilities. Choice of compensation methods and equal treatment

Abstract: When a property is in need to get access to a facility with a certain purpose – e.g. an access road to the property – the Swedish legislation states that it under some certain conditions is possible to establish the facility compulsory on another property. When a compulsory acquisition occur the legislation also states that the owner of the property that surrender land for the facility shall get compensated for the intrusion the facility makes on his or her property. The cardinal rule to determine the compensation level for these cases – when the Swedish Joint Facilities Act applies – is that the compensation level shall be based on the decrease in market value i.e. the damage that the facility causes on the acquired property plus an equitable share of the benefit that the facility causes for the properties that get access to the facility. These situations are in general speaking named profit sharing cases. Further states the travaux préparatoires that the distribution of the profit shall be equitable with guidance of the distribution that had occurred in a “normal” voluntary agreement between the involved parties (prop. 1991/92:127 s. 69). To be able to apply the legislators requirements of equitable and “normal” voluntary agreement in a real situation there are a number of methods that can be used to decide the compensation level. A problem with these methods is that it’s not always obvious a priori which method that should be used for a certain facility. A risk that occurs when it’s not clearly defined which method that shall be used in a certain situation is that substantially different levels of compensation can occur in different cases, even if the purpose with the facility is the same. For these cases when it’s not a priori defined which method that shall be used it’s up to the cadastral surveyor – after his or her preferences regarding what can be seen as equitable – to decide in the particular case which compensation level that best correspond to the legislators requirements of an equitable and “normal” voluntary agreement. With this said, there is an obvious risk that similar situations and cases get treated unequal from a compensation perspective according to which method the cadastral surveyor chose to apply. With respect to the problem description above, the purpose of this thesis have been to investigate how the compensation legislation in the Joint Facilities Act are applied or can be applied by the cadastral authority in joint facility procedures. The investigation was performed through a study of procedure acts from the cadastral authority.