In the Iowa Supreme Court
No. 24–0548
Submitted October 7, 2025—Filed November 21, 2025
The Law Office of Shawn Shearer, P.C., Shawn Shearer,
and Theodore F. Sporer,
Plaintiffs,
vs.
Iowa District Court for Fremont County,
Defendant.
Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Fremont County, Greg W.
Steensland (merits) and Eric J. Nelson (sanctions), judges.
Two attorneys petition for a writ of certiorari challenging a $30,000
sanctions award under rule 1.413(1) for their representation of clients
challenging a wind turbine construction project. Writ Sustained.
Oxley, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which all justices joined.
Shawn Shearer (argued) of The Shearer Law Office, P.C., Des Moines, and
Theodore F. Sporer, Clive, pro se, for plaintiffs.
Robert M. Livingston and Kristopher K. Madsen of Stuart Tinley Law Firm,
LLP, Council Bluffs, for defendant.
Brant M. Leonard (argued), Bret A. Dublinske, and Kristy Dahl Rogers
(until withdrawal) of Fredrikson & Byron, P.A., Des Moines, for intervenor
Shenandoah Hills Wind Project, LLC.
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Oxley, Justice.
Two attorneys were sanctioned $30,000 arising out of their representation
of Fremont County residents who filed suit to challenge a wind turbine
construction project in the county. The district court found that the attorneys
were subject to sanctions under Iowa Rule of Civil Procedure 1.413(1) because
their legal positions were not well-grounded in existing law or a good faith
argument to extend, modify, or reverse existing law. For the reasons set forth
below, we conclude that the district court abused its discretion by imposing
sanctions. We therefore sustain the attorneys’ writ of certiorari.
I. Factual Background and Proceedings.
Shenandoah Hills Wind Project, LLC (SHW) is an affiliate of Invenergy LLC,
a large international developer of renewable energy with several wind farms
across Iowa. In 2020, it began work to develop a wind energy conversion system
(WECS) project to be constructed across Page and Fremont Counties in
southwest Iowa. The project proposed building thirty-plus wind turbine sites in
each county. SHW worked with each county’s board of supervisors to approve
the projects. The Page County Board of Supervisors (Page County BOS) passed
an ordinance regulating the WECS projects on October 29, 2019. The Fremont
County Board of Supervisors (Fremont County BOS) passed a similar wind
ordinance—Fremont County Ordinance #2020-1, entitled “An Ordinance
Regulating the Construction, Installation, and Maintenance of Wind Energy
Conversion Systems and Addressing the Standards and Conditions Thereof
Within Fremont County, Iowa” (Fremont County wind ordinance)—on June 24,
2020.
SHW submitted a permit application on March 23, 2022, to site and
construct a WECS to both county boards of supervisors, as required by each
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county’s respective wind ordinance. Each county board held meetings to discuss
the respective permit applications throughout the summer, where residents
voiced their concerns about and objections to the wind turbine projects. Despite
the objections, the Fremont County BOS approved SHW’s permit application for
the project in Fremont County on July 13, and the Page County BOS approved
SHW’s permit application for the project in Page County on August 2.
The wind ordinances also required the developer to enter into a road-use
agreement and a decommissioning agreement with the county before it could
begin construction of an approved WECS project. A road-use agreement is a
separate agreement defining the rights and obligations of the county and the
developer related to the construction, maintenance, and use of county roads in
connection with the development of the WECS. A decommissioning agreement
identifies the anticipated means and the estimated costs to remove each wind
energy device within a specified time of its discontinued use. The county board
must also authorize the zoning administrator to provide the necessary building
permits required for each wind turbine before construction can begin. The
Fremont County BOS approved a road-use agreement and a decommissioning
agreement with SHW on December 28. The Page County project, by contrast,
never got to the point of entering into those agreements with SHW.
Plaintiffs Shawn Shearer and Theodore Sporer (collectively,
“plaintiff attorneys”) are Iowa attorneys who represented residents of Page
County and Fremont County opposing construction of the proposed wind farms
in their respective counties. Plaintiff attorneys filed a petition in the Iowa District
Court for Page County on behalf of James Hunter and other Page County
residents (collectively referred to as “the Hunters”) on September 19, 2022,
against Page County, its board of supervisors, the individual supervisors, the
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county attorney, and the county’s zoning administrator seeking to halt the SHW
project. The Page County defendants removed the case to the United States
District Court for the Southern District of Iowa based on the Hunters’ federal
due process claim. Then they filed a pre-answer motion to dismiss. SHW moved
to intervene and also filed a motion to dismiss. In a published order entered on
January 31, 2023, the federal district court dismissed all claims, including the
state law claims. See Hunter v. Page County, 653 F. Supp. 3d 600, 621 (S.D. Iowa
2023) (Pratt, J.), aff’d in part, vacated in part, 102 F.4th 853 (8th Cir. 2024).1
The federal court concluded that Page County’s approval of the permit was
a quasi-judicial function, so those challenges needed to be brought through a
writ of certiorari as the exclusive remedy. Id. at 616–17. The court then
concluded the Hunters filed their petition ten days too late, requiring those
counts to be dismissed. Id. at 617, 619–20. For the challenges to the wind
ordinance, the court concluded dismissal was appropriate regardless of whether
the board was acting in a legislative or a quasi-judicial capacity because the
board properly exercised its home rule authority to enact the wind ordinance. Id.
at 617–18. In reaching that conclusion, the court distinguished the Page County
wind ordinance from the one in Mathis v. Palo Alto County Board of Supervisors,
927 N.W.2d 191 (Iowa 2019), which the court characterized as a zoning
1The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated much of the district court’s decision because
Page County residents elected different members to the Page County BOS while the case was on appeal, and SHW’s permit was revoked by the new board shortly after the district court entered its order. The majority held that the challenges to the ordinance and the permit approval were therefore moot. See Hunter, 102 F.4th at 863. The appellate court affirmed dismissal of the state law Open Meetings Act claims under the heightened federal pleading standard, recognizing that those claims might have survived our more liberal notice pleading standards. Id. at 874–75. Judge Colloton concurred in part. In his view, it was unnecessary to consider whether the claims were moot because they were not even yet “ripe for adjudication,” given the additional regulatory approval needed to start construction on the project. Id. at 875–76 (Colloton, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) (“The project may never come to fruition, and any assessment of the plaintiffs’ challenges relating to the Wind Ordinance and issuance of a permit should wait until a more concrete controversy arises.”).
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ordinance. Id. at 618 (“[U]nlike the ordinance in Mathis, the Wind Ordinance is
not a zoning ordinance or an amendment to a zoning ordinance.”). The court also
dismissed the remaining Open Meetings Act claims for failing to meet the
heightened plausibility standard applied to federal pleadings. Id.
Meanwhile, plaintiff attorneys filed the action giving rise to this certiorari
proceeding in the Iowa District Court for Fremont County on January 25—six
days before the federal district court’s order was entered in Hunter—on behalf of
Danny Jennings and other Fremont County residents (collectively referred to as
“the Jennings”) against Fremont County, the Fremont County BOS, and the
individual supervisors (collectively, “Fremont County defendants”). The petition
asserted twenty-three claims that generally challenged: (1) the substance of and
the process used to enact the Fremont County wind ordinance; (2) approval of
SHW’s application for a permit for the WECS project in Fremont County;
(3) compliance with the procedures required by the Open Meetings Act under
Iowa Code chapter 21 related to approving SHW’s permit application; and
(4) approval of the road-use and decommissioning agreements. The petition
asserted several different bases for the challenges, but a primary point of
contention asserted that the wind ordinance was inconsistent with the
two-and-a-half-story height restriction contained in a Fremont County zoning
ordinance. The petition also asserted that the wind ordinance’s generalized
repealer provision was insufficient to satisfy statutory requirements for making
an exception to that zoning ordinance. See Iowa Code § 331.302(4) (2022)
(“An amendment to an ordinance . . . shall specifically repeal the
ordinance . . . or the . . . subpart to be amended, and shall set forth the
ordinance . . . or subpart as amended.”).
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SHW quickly sought to intervene, as it had in the Page County litigation.
Its counsel sent the plaintiff attorneys a letter on February 6 “pursuant to Iowa
Rule of Civil Procedure 1.413(1)” requesting that they voluntarily dismiss the
matter and threatening to seek sanctions if they did not. The letter—similar to
one that SHW’s counsel sent just after the plaintiff attorneys filed the
Page County lawsuit—asserted that the Fremont County petition “violates your
obligations under Rule 1.413(1), and so will every single document you file in
furtherance of it subsequent to your receipt of this letter.” The letter included a
copy of the recently entered federal district court order in Hunter dismissing the
lawsuit against Page County.
The plaintiff attorneys did not voluntarily dismiss the Fremont County
case. But they did file an amended petition on behalf of the Jennings, which
removed two of the original claims and made other revisions to the petition in
response to Hunter. The Jennings also sought a temporary restraining order to
halt action on an item on the Fremont County BOS’s upcoming meeting agenda
seeking approval of a right-of-way permit for SHW to begin removing trees and
shrubs prefatory to construction of the WECS project. On March 28, the district
court ordered the Fremont County BOS to take no action on the right-of-way
permit until the court could hold a hearing on the Jennings’ request for a
restraining order. That request was ultimately heard on May 15, at the same
time as SHW’s subsequent motion to dismiss the lawsuit, joined by the Fremont
County defendants.
On June 13, the district court dismissed the case and lifted the stay order.
The district court dismissed the counts challenging the substance of the wind
ordinance based on its conclusions that: (1) a county can use its home rule
authority rather than its zoning authority to regulate wind farms through
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stand-alone ordinances, so provisions in the Fremont County zoning ordinance
containing height restrictions did not need to be amended or excepted pursuant
to Iowa Code section 331.302(4); (2) the Fremont County zoning ordinance is not
a “comprehensive plan,” so Iowa Code section 335.5 did not require the
stand-alone wind ordinance to comply with the zoning ordinance; and (3) the
ordinance was not unconstitutionally vague as a matter of law. It dismissed the
counts raising procedural challenges to enactment of the wind ordinance
because it found the county substantially complied with the statutory process.
It dismissed the counts challenging approval of the permit application for failure
to state a claim. It dismissed the counts challenging approval of the road-use
and decommissioning agreements because those agreements “speak for
themselves” and were within the Fremont County BOS’s authority. And it
dismissed the counts alleging violations of the Open Meetings Act as failing to
state a claim, noting that whether a gathering of board members constituted a
“meeting” was a matter of law for the court to decide.
We transferred the Jennings’ appeal to the court of appeals, which affirmed
in part and reversed in part. The court of appeals concluded that “nearly all of
the Board’s actions at issue in this appeal were quasi-judicial,” Jennings
v. Fremont County, No. 23–1101, 2024 WL 5152369, at *4 (Iowa Ct. App. Dec. 18,
2024), such that certiorari review was the exclusive method for bringing the
challenges even though the Jennings also sought declaratory and injunctive
relief, id. Noting that the petition was filed 197 days after the permit application
was approved and 946 days after the wind ordinance was passed, the court of
appeals affirmed dismissal of all counts as untimely except the ones regarding
the Open Meetings Act. See id. (citing Iowa R. Civ. P. 1.1402(3), which requires
certiorari claims to be brought within thirty days of the purportedly illegal
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action). So, unlike the district court, the court of appeals did not reach the merits
of any of the claims. The court of appeals reversed dismissal of the Open
Meetings Act counts because they satisfied our notice pleading standards. Id.
at 5. Judge Langholz joined the majority opinion in full but filed a special
concurrence to clarify his separate view on the ordinance’s general repealer
clause. He emphasized that “no one should read the court’s opinion as blessing
the ordinance’s general repealer clause.” Id. at 6 (Langholz, J., concurring
specially). He further explained that “[i]n a case where it were necessary to do
so, [he] would not hesitate to hold the clause violates section 331.302(4) because
it fails to specify any particular provision that is repealed.” Id.
In the meantime, back in district court, SHW filed a motion for sanctions
on July 13, 2023, against the Jennings’ counsel—the attorney plaintiffs in this
certiorari proceeding. The district court judge who entered the order dismissing
the case on the merits had reached mandatory retirement age, so the sanctions
motion was considered by a different judge who was newly appointed to the case.
The district court granted the motion for sanctions on November 7. The parties
then briefed the appropriate amount of sanctions, and the district court entered
an order on March 7, 2024, requiring the Jennings’ counsel to pay a monetary
sanction of $30,000, with $20,000 paid to SHW and $10,000 paid to the Fremont
County defendants.
The plaintiff attorneys filed a timely petition for writ of certiorari to our
court on April 2. We granted the writ on July 12 and retained the appeal.
II. Analysis.
A. Standard of Review. A writ of certiorari is the proper vehicle for
challenging a district court’s order imposing sanctions on an attorney. See Davis
v. Iowa Dist. Ct. for Scott Cnty., 943 N.W.2d 58, 61 (Iowa 2020); Hearity v. Iowa
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Dist. Ct. for Fayette Cnty., 440 N.W.2d 860, 862 (Iowa 1989). We review a district
court’s decision to award sanctions for abuse of discretion. Dupaco Cmty. Credit
Union v. Iowa Dist. Ct. for Linn Cnty., 13 N.W.3d 580, 589 (Iowa 2024). Under
that standard, the district court’s factfindings are binding on us “if they are
supported by substantial evidence.” Id. A district court abuses its discretion
when it “exercises its discretion on grounds or for reasons clearly untenable or
to an extent clearly unreasonable.” Id. (quoting Schettler v. Iowa Dist. Ct. for
Carroll Cnty., 509 N.W.2d 459, 464 (Iowa 1993)). “An erroneous application of
the law is clearly untenable.” Id. (quoting Rowedder v. Anderson, 814 N.W.2d
585, 589 (Iowa 2012)). Thus, under the abuse of discretion standard, “we will
correct an erroneous application of the law.” Id. (quoting Barnhill v. Iowa Dist.
Ct. for Polk Cnty., 765 N.W.2d 267, 272 (Iowa 2009)).
B. Framework for a Rule 1.413(1) Sanction. SHW sought, and the
district court awarded, sanctions under Iowa Rule of Civil Procedure 1.413(1).
That rule defines the representations that are necessarily included in an
attorney’s signature on a pleading or other filing with the court.2 The rule
“affirm[s] that a person’s signature on a motion, pleading, or other paper filed
with the court is a ‘certificate’ that the person has read the item, that it is
grounded in fact and law to the best of the person’s knowledge after a reasonable
inquiry, and that it is not interposed for an improper purpose.” Dupaco Cmty.
2Rule 1.413(1) provides:
Counsel’s signature to every motion, pleading, or other paper shall be
deemed a certificate that: counsel has read the motion, pleading, or other paper;
that to the best of counsel’s knowledge, information, and belief, formed after
reasonable inquiry, it is well grounded in fact and is warranted by existing law or
a good faith argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law;
and that it is not interposed for any improper purpose, such as to harass or cause
an unnecessary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation.
Iowa R. Civ. P. 1.413(1); see also Iowa Code § 619.19(2) (setting same expectations for signature by counsel or a party).
10
Credit Union, 13 N.W.3d at 584. We refer to these as the “reading, inquiry, and
purpose elements” of the signature requirement. Weigel v. Weigel, 467 N.W.2d
277, 280 (Iowa 1991). A breach of any of these independent duties requires the
court to impose a sanction. Barnhill, 765 N.W.2d at 272; see also Mathias
v. Glandon, 448 N.W.2d 443, 445 (Iowa 1989) (en banc) (“The question . . . is not
whether a court shall impose sanctions when it finds a violation—it must; . . . .”).
Here, SHW sought sanctions under the inquiry element by asserting that
there was no legal basis to support the pleadings filed on behalf of the Jennings,
particularly after the federal district court dismissed the Hunter case on
January 31, 2023. Whether counsel failed to make a reasonable inquiry into the
law requires a court to consider “the complexity of factual and legal issues, the
clarity or ambiguity of existing law, and the plausibility of the legal positions
asserted.” Dupaco Cmty. Credit Union, 13 N.W.3d at 589–90 (quoting Est. of
Bisignano, 991 N.W.2d 135, 142 (Iowa 2023)). An attorney’s conduct is assessed
against “an objective, not subjective, standard of reasonableness under the
circumstances.” Id. at 590 (quoting Est. of Bisignano, 991 N.W.2d at 142).
“Arguments ‘made in good faith’ weigh against a sanction.” Est. of Bisignano,
991 N.W.2d at 142 (quoting Homeland Energy Sols., LLC v. Retterath, 938 N.W.2d
664, 710 (Iowa 2020)).
The district court agreed with SHW that sanctions were warranted, relying
heavily on the federal court’s Hunter opinion. In addressing the legal complexity
of the case, the district court recognized that “the contours of [the constitutional
county home rule’s] meaning and interplay with other laws is relatively untested”
but that, “as the Hunter court noted, ‘the problems raised here are not issues of
first impression in the State.’ ” (quoting Hunter, 653 F. Supp. 3d at 615).
In considering whether there was any ambiguity in the law, again, the district
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court recognized that “there is some ambiguity in the area of county home rule
law,” but it noted that many of the claims involved other areas of general
municipal law and that “the existing law was further clarified by the Hunter
court.” And with respect to plausibility, the district court concluded that
“[w]hile there are some claims that are plausible, the majority of claims have
minimal plausibility due to weak factual or legal bases, or because the issues
were already decided in Hunter.”3
The district court considered the eleven American Bar Association (ABA)
guidelines we discussed in Mathias v. Glandon. See 448 N.W.2d at 446–47
(“In determining whether a reasonable inquiry into the law has been made, the
court considers all relevant circumstances,” including a list from the ABA).
Although the ABA guidelines provide circumstances that could help determine
whether counsel made a proper inquiry into the law, we caution that these are
merely a list of circumstances. They are not “factors” or elements of a test to be
considered or weighed as a balancing test in every case. Nevertheless, after
considering each circumstance listed in the ABA guidelines, the district court
“found that counsel for Petitioners have violated Rule 1.413 by initiating and
maintaining this case despite it not being warranted by existing law or a good
faith argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law.”
1. Rule 1.413(1) imposes no continuing duty. We start by reiterating that
rule 1.413(1) focuses on an attorney’s conduct at the time a specific filing is
3The district court rejected two counts as implausible in part because they cited Iowa Code section 351.1, which—as pointed out by SHW in its motion to dismiss—was repealed in 1994 and related to licensing requirements for dogs. Those counts also cited Iowa Code section 352.5, governing county land use plans. Despite SHW’s purported inability “to discern what statute Petitioners might have meant to cite,” it seems most likely that the cite to section 351.1 was a typographical error intended to cite to section 352.1—the “purpose” provision identifying the general assembly’s “intent to provide for the orderly use and development of land” in Iowa. Thi s apparent typo does not support sanctions.
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signed. “[T]here [i]s no continuing duty under [the] sanction rule.” Mathias,
448 N.W.2d at 447; see also Schettler, 509 N.W.2d at 465 (“Mathias specifically
rejected any notion that Rule [1.413(1)] imposes a continuing duty on the signer
to dismiss the action if the signer later learns the client has no case.”).
In Mathias, plaintiff’s counsel learned—after filing the original petition—that
there was no factual basis for seeking to toll the statute of limitations based on
the minor plaintiff’s mental injuries. Mathias, 448 N.W.2d at 447. Even so, the
district court properly rejected the defendant’s argument that plaintiff’s “counsel
had a duty to dismiss the lawsuit when he learned his client had no case.” Id.
Later-acquired information is not generally relevant to the rule 1.413(1)
sanctions inquiry because the plain language of the rule “clearly expresses an
intent that the court evaluate the signer’s conduct at the time of signing the
pleading, motion, or other paper.” Id.
The same is true here. Whatever insight the federal district court’s Hunter
opinion might have provided for the Jennings’ claims, rule 1.413(1) did not
require the plaintiff attorneys to dismiss the previously filed Jennings petition on
threat of sanctions. The Iowa district court erred as a matter of law when it
concluded that the plaintiff attorneys engaged in sanctionable conduct
“by initiating and maintaining this case” based on the postfiling Hunter decision
in federal court.
2. Each filed paper must be considered separately. We also stress that
rule 1.413(1) requires a court to consider counsel’s actions with respect to each
specific filing signed by counsel. Here, after the district court concluded that the
plaintiff attorneys engaged in sanctionable conduct, it had the parties focus on
events after the Hunter dismissal to brief and argue the amount of an appropriate
sanction. In its subsequent order determining the amount of the sanction, the
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district court identified ten pleadings it deemed sanctionable, including the
amended petition, three motions related to the temporary restraining order to
prevent Fremont County from approving a right-of-way permit for SHW to begin
cutting down trees, a motion for partial judgment on the pleadings with respect
to one count, and resistances or replies to motions filed by SHW or the Fremont
County defendants.
The district court’s analysis focused on the amended petition but failed to
address legal deficiencies in any of the other nine identified filings. The three
filings related to the temporary restraining order were filed specifically to halt
impending action by the Fremont County BOS that would have allowed SHW to
begin preliminary physical work in preparation for constructing the wind farm.
Other than challenging the continuing underlying legal basis for the lawsuit,
SHW never argued—and the district court did not find—that the Jennings had
no legal basis for seeking a temporary halt to the construction work during the
pendency of the lawsuit.
Similarly, no challenge was made to the specific legal assertions made in
the resistances to motions filed by SHW and the Fremont County defendants.
If—as we’ve said—rule 1.413(1) does not require an attorney to dismiss a lawsuit
based on subsequently learned information, then it is not necessarily violated
each time the attorney files additional papers in district court. That
determination—whether subsequent filings violated rule 1.413(1)—depends on
the legal positions taken in each of the subsequent filings. The district court
abused its discretion in concluding that ten different filings violated rule 1.413(1)
without considering the specific allegations made and the legal premises relied
upon in each filing.
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3. The amended petition was not sanctionable. Even considering the
plaintiff attorneys’ conduct in signing the amended petition, we conclude that
the district court abused its discretion in finding that the legal bases for the
petition were so lacking as to be sanctionable. Courts should be especially
cautious when a party seeks sanctions on the basis that a pleading is legally
frivolous. “Close scrutiny of an attorney’s duty under [rule 1.413(1)] can have the
effect of stifling legal creativity, repressing vigorous advocacy, multiplying
expansive satellite litigation over sanctions, and creating a danger of arbitrary
and inconsistent enforcement.” Mark S. Cady, Curbing Litigation Abuse and
Misuse: A Judicial Approach, 36 Drake L. Rev. 483, 495 (1987). The rule requires
only that a legal position be “warranted by existing law or a good faith argument
for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law.” Iowa R. Civ. P.
1.413(1). Even when a position is directly precluded by binding precedent,
attorneys must be allowed to make good faith arguments for changes in the law.
As such, a court should not take too broad a view in assessing whether a
filing is sufficiently supported by the law. See Cady, 36 Drake L. Rev. at 495
(“The duty to support the legal merit behind each document presents a potential
for danger if defined in broad terms.”). A conclusory analysis, such as the
conclusion that plaintiff attorneys made arguments contrary to “topics in general
municipal law that are settled,” is inadequate to support sanctions without
identifying the positions that are legally deficient. Rather, district courts should
consider the specific legal bases presented to support a pleading to determine
whether the attorney had a good faith basis for taking a particular position.
A claim that identifies an issue of first impression or seeks to clarify existing law
is not frivolous even though it turns out to lack legal merit. See, e.g., Est. of
Bisignano, 991 N.W.2d at 142 (“In In re Guardianship of Radda[, 955 N.W.2d 203
15
(Iowa 2021)], for instance, we determined that even though a party presented
questions of first impression that lacked merit, the arguments weren’t frivolous
within the meaning of rule 1.413(1).”).
Here, despite finding that the meaning and interplay between the
constitutional county home rule and other laws was “relatively untested” and
that “there is some ambiguity in the area of county home rule law,” the district
court concluded that the plaintiff attorneys’ legal positions were sanctionable.
The court relied almost exclusively on the federal district court’s decision
dismissing the Hunter litigation and our prior case of Mathis v. Palo Alto County
Board of Supervisors, 929 N.W.2d 191 (Iowa 2019), to conclude that the plaintiff
attorneys failed to make an adequate inquiry into the relevant law. Even setting
aside the timing issue between the original petition and the subsequent Hunter
ruling in federal court, the district court’s reliance on Hunter to sanction the
amended petition was an abuse of discretion.
First, there were material factual differences between the two cases. The
Jennings’ claims included challenges to the road-use and decommissioning
agreements between Fremont County and SHW, but the Page County project was
not as far along and had not yet entered those agreements. So the Hunter
litigation did not touch on those claims. Further, the specific procedural
challenges to enacting the respective county wind ordinances, including any
purported conflicts of interest by individual supervisors or overreaching by
Invenergy into the approval process, involved different county boards with
different members and raised disparate procedural defects. So Hunter likewise
did not touch on those distinct challenges brought by the Jennings’ plaintiffs.
How these factual differences might play out even under the Hunter analysis was
not so clear as to make filing the amended petition sanctionable. See Retterath,
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938 N.W.2d at 710 (holding that sanctions were not appropriate even though an
intervening case that undermined the plaintiff’s position—and in which the same
counsel was involved—was decided prior to the ruling in the current case where
an “argument that the indemnity provision under these facts was an attorney fee
provision had some basis in fact”).
More importantly, Hunter is a decision by a federal district court, which
“is bound to follow—not lead—state-court jurisprudence.” Zick v. Verson Allsteel
Press Co., 623 F. Supp. 927, 932 (N.D. Ill. 1985) (“[T]hough in an Illinois state
court Zick might perhaps have had a ‘good faith argument for the extension,
modification, or reversal of existing law,’ any argument of that type was also
doomed to failure in this Court” given “the firmly-entrenched canon . . . that [a]
federal court is bound to follow—not lead—state-court jurisprudence.” (emphasis
omitted)). Indeed, when it comes to deciding state law issues, federal courts are
“inferior in authority” to state courts. State v. White, 9 N.W.3d 1, 10 (Iowa 2024).
Thus, even if the order in Hunter might be persuasive about Iowa law, it was not
binding on the Iowa district court in Jennings. Nor did it render the plaintiff
attorneys’ continued pursuit of claims in Jennings through the amended petition
an unreasonable inquiry into the law, where they could freely argue that Hunter
was wrongly decided.
Nor does our Mathis decision support sanctions. Mathis involved a
challenge to a wind ordinance passed by the Palo Alto County Board of
Supervisors and approval of a wind farm project to be developed by Palo Alto
Wind Energy, L.L.C. (another subsidiary of Invenergy) and eventually owned and
operated by MidAmerican Energy. See 927 N.W.2d at 193. But the issues differed
from the ones asserted here. For example, the Mathis plaintiffs did “not contend
that the ordinance was procedurally or substantively improper,” id. at 196, but
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the Jennings did. We rejected the Mathis’ challenge to Invenergy and
MidAmerican Energy’s involvement in the Palo Alto ordinance because the
county had not “merely rubberstamped” a proposal from the private parties
where it “accepted some but not all” of their requests. Id. Whether the Fremont
County BOS rubber-stamped SHW’s input into the ordinance depends on a
different set of facts.
The Mathis’ challenges to approval of the permit were also factually
different than the ones raised by the Jennings to SHW’s permit. See id. at 197–99
(discussing challenges about whether the developer also had to be the ultimate
owner and claims that the county failed to consider recommendations by the
department of natural resources and state archeologist concerning wildlife and
endangered species as well as an acoustical expert’s report about noise levels).
The district court failed to address these factual differences when it broadly
concluded that the plaintiff attorneys’ amended pleadings were inconsistent with
Mathis.
Further, Mathis highlights the “untested” interplay noted by the district
court between a county’s home rule authority and its zoning authority in the
context of wind ordinances. One of the fighting issues raised in Jennings was
whether the newly enacted Fremont County wind ordinance conflicted with the
two-and-a-half-story height restriction included in the Fremont County zoning
ordinance such that the wind ordinance needed to amend or except that zoning
ordinance under Iowa Code section 331.302(4). In Hunter, the federal district
court distinguished the Page County wind ordinance from the Palo Alto wind
ordinance in Mathis because that one was a “zoning ordinance or an amendment
to a zoning ordinance.” Hunter, 653 F. Supp. 3d at 618; see also Mathis,
927 N.W.2d at 194, 196 (explaining that the county attorney “draft[ed] a new
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zoning ordinance” modeled after wind ordinances from other counties and
applying the “general rule . . . that zoning determinations are a legislative
function of a city council or board of supervisors” (second quoting Residential &
Agric. Advisory Comm., LLC v. Dyersville City Council, 888 N.W.2d 24, 40
(Iowa 2016))). The Hunter court then concluded that the Page County wind
ordinance was proper as a stand-alone ordinance pursuant to the county’s home
rule authority, not its zoning authority, so any discrepancies with the Page
County zoning ordinance were immaterial. See Hunter, 653 F. Supp. 3d at 617.
Yet, in this case, SHW characterizes Mathis as dismissing
“claims concerning a home-rule wind ordinance” with a citation to the Palo Alto
County’s website, even though we treated that ordinance as stemming from the
county’s zoning authority, not its home rule authority. “Home rule” is never
mentioned in our Mathis opinion. And in the appeal of the merits of the Jennings’
case, Judge Langholz of our court of appeals concurred specially on this very
point to make clear that, in his view, the general repealer language included in
the Fremont County wind ordinance “violates [Iowa Code] section 331.302(4)
because it fails to specify any particular provision that is repealed.” Jennings,
2024 WL 5152369, at *6 (Langholz, J., concurring specially). As the final arbiter
of state law, we have not definitively settled the interplay between a county’s
home rule authority and its zoning authority with respect to wind ordinances.
In short, the district court abused its discretion when it disregarded the
unsettled law surrounding a county’s authority with respect to enacting wind
ordinances and sanctioned the plaintiff attorneys for pursuing this legal
challenge.
Finally, we note that our court of appeals reversed dismissal of the
Jennings’ Open Meetings Act claims, so those claims were not frivolous. While
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the court of appeals affirmed dismissal of the remaining claims as untimely
under the thirty-day timeframe for bringing a writ of certiorari under rule
1.1402,4 that was not a foregone conclusion when the amended petition was
filed. Indeed, in Mathis, we decided the merits of the challenges to the wind
ordinance in that case even though the action was filed over a year later. See
927 N.W.2d at 194–95 (noting that the ordinance was approved on September
27, 2016, and the plaintiffs’ petition for declaratory and injunctive relief and a
writ of certiorari was filed on November 22, 2017). And Judge Colloton did not
believe the similar challenges were even ripe—let alone untimely—in Hunter. See
102 F.4th at 875–76.
Rule 1.413(1) “was not intended to chill an attorney’s enthusiasm or
creativity in pursuing legal or factual theories.” Cady, 36 Drake L. Rev. at 495;
see also First Am. Bank v. Fobian Farms, Inc., 906 N.W.2d 736, 751 (Iowa 2018)
(agreeing with concerns raised by the United States Supreme Court in Cooter &
Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., 496 U.S. 384, 393 (1990), which “recogniz[ed] Rule 11’s
‘central goal of deterrence’ but noting ‘concerns that it will spawn satellite
litigation and chill vigorous advocacy’ ”). Wind farms are relatively new in Iowa,
and the interplay between a county board’s zoning authority and its home rule
authority is not so clear and well-established as to cut off all attempts to ensure
boards are properly enacting wind ordinances and approving permits.
“The primary purpose of sanctions under rule 1.413(1) is to deter frivolous
litigation, not to compensate the winning side.” Est. of Bisignano, 991 N.W.2d at
142. That the Jennings’ claims were dismissed at the pleading stage did not
mean they were legally frivolous.
4This seems to be factually erroneous with respect to the counts challenging the road-use
and decommissioning agreements approved by the Fremont BOS on December 28, 2022, within thirty days of the Jennings’ petition filed on January 25, 2023.
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III. Conclusion.
The district court abused its discretion by awarding sanctions against the
plaintiff attorneys. We sustain the plaintiff attorneys’ writ of certiorari and vacate
the district court’s sanctions order.
Writ Sustained.