With Daniel Banyai nowhere in sight, the Vermont Supreme Court heard his appeal regarding whether the state environmental court should have been able to order his arrest, fine him, and allow the town of Pawlet to bring his property into zoning compliance.
Yet as Merrill Bent, Pawlet’s attorney, told the court, Banyai is not in jail, and his property, the controversial former paramilitary training facility Slate Ridge, is not in compliance.
Banyai, she argued, has been operating “under the patina of good faith legal argument” while evading the law.
Banyai currently faces an active arrest warrant and more than $100,000 in fines. Earlier this month, law enforcement authorities said they had been told the former Pawlet resident had left Vermont with no plans to return.
Four of Vermont’s five supreme court justices plus a substitute, Superior Court Judge Timothy Tomasi, weighed in on the case Tuesday, asking questions of Bent and Banyai’s attorney, Robert Kaplan, during half an hour of oral arguments. Justice William Cohen was disqualified from hearing the appeal.
Chief Justice Paul Reiber opened the hearing by thanking the state workers who had helped reopen the court following last summer’s flooding. Tuesday’s hearings, he noted, were the first heard in person in more than six months.
“We’re pleased to be back in the courthouse,” Reiber said.
Kaplan, arguing first on Tuesday morning, contended that the environmental court had moved from “coercive” to “punitive” sanctions by levying more than $100,000 in fines against his client and potentially allowing for Banyai to remain in jail until Pawlet officials bring his property into compliance.
A particular concern for Kaplan was his interpretation that the environmental court had “given the town the power” to decide “how long (Banyai) would be in jail,” because the court’s orders indicated Banyai would be held in jail until his property was brought into compliance, and the town was given permission to enter his property and effect compliance.
Arguing second, Bent highlighted that the ostensibly punitive nature of the sanctions, as Kaplan described them, had still not resulted in the deconstruction of unpermitted structures on the property.
In turn, she posed to the court whether Banyai was free to “defy court orders” and “endlessly litigate.”
Vermont State Police and the Rutland County sheriff are required to inform the environmental court every 30 days of their attempts to arrest Banyai.
A previous warrant for Banyai’s arrest expired unexecuted. After an inspection of Slate Ridge late last year, Judge Thomas Durkin ruled in environmental court that the property remained noncompliant and reissued an arrest warrant for Banyai.
Banyai appealed the court’s sanctions against him last July. There is no specific timeline for the court to rule on his appeal.
Asked before the hearing whether he’d heard from his client, Kaplan offered little insight.
He has a lot of clients, he said, adding, “Some I hear from, some I don’t.”
