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Court opinion:
In 2007, a municipal "construction official" issues a notice that a particular building is "unsafe", since a water-line rupture has caused it to lose electrical power. In 2011, the construction official issues a second notice, noting that the roof and walls have begun to deteriorate. In 2017, a third notice points out that the roof is full of holes and the walls are failing. But the owner does absolutely nothing to fix the building.
In 2019 the construction official finally files a complaint in municipal court, charging the owner with the administrative offense of maintaining an unsafe structure. The municipal judge finds the owner guilty. No fines are imposed, but the owner is given a week to prove that he has 50 k$ for repairing the building. The owner fails to come up with the money, so the judge orders that the building be demolished. The owner's lawyer fails to file the appeal properly, so the stay pending appeal expires and the demolition is completed before the appeals panel issues its ruling.
The appeals panel finds this situation to be a comedy of errors. (1) The owner should have appealed the municipal construction official's unsafe-structure notices to the county's "construction board of appeals". Since he failed to do so, he had no right to a trial in the first place. So, at first glance, the municipal judge's order should be affirmed. However, (2) the municipal construction official should have filed the complaint in the state's full-fledged "superior court", not in municipal court, whose very limited jurisdiction does not encompass ordering the demolition of a building. So the municipal judge's order cannot be affirmed, and instead the complaint must be dismissed. (It may be that the building posed sufficient danger of imminent collapse that the construction official was empowered to order demolition on his own, without resorting to the judicial system at all. But that question is beyond the scope of this appeal.)
New Jersey's judges have been slacking lately. They released only four nonprecedential appellate decisions in this entire week! Maybe they're busy with some mandatory training.
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