Group sues University of Michigan over drone ban

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

A hearing set for next month could determine whether the University of Michigan has the right to ban drone flights over all its properties.

On December 17 the Michigan Court of Claims will hear arguments in the case of Michigan Coalition of Drone Operators vs. the Regents of the University of Michigan. The plaintiffs in the case argue that a university ordinance banning drone overflights violates the state’s drone regulation pre-emption law as well as federal law that gives the FAA sole authority to regulate the nation’s airspace.

The coalition previously had successfully sued to strike down similar ordinances in cases involving the Genesee County Parks Commission and Ottawa County. However, the university’s Board of Regents argues that those cases do not create a binding precedent, because, unlike those counties, the university is not a subdivision of the state.

Dean Greenblatt, an attorney for the coalition, called the university’s anti-drone ordinance “pernicious” because it makes violations of the ordinance a criminal offense.

“The drone ordinance not only bans the overflight of university property, it criminalizes it, makes it a 90-day misdemeanor with a minimum of 10 days in jail. So, when I say it’s pernicious, I mean it’s pernicious,” he said.

A group of concerned drone operators and advocates formed the MCDO several years ago to challenge local ordinances thought to be in violation of the state’s pre-emption law of 2016, which states “a political subdivision shall not enact or enforce an ordinance or resolution that regulates the ownership or operation of unmanned aircraft or otherwise engage in the regulation of the ownership or operation of unmanned aircraft.”

Greenblatt said the court hearing will be held to rule on a motion by the university to dismiss the case. The plaintiffs in turn have filed their own motion to have the university’s ordinance declared illegal. A ruling on the motions could come down anywhere from two days to two months after the hearing, he said.

The case involving Genesee County, near Flint, arose following the arrest of drone operator Jason Harrison for allegedly violating the county’s anti-drone rules banning drone operations over parks.

“He was handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car for flying a drone,” Greenblatt said. “And eventually we had to go to court to have the ordinance that was created in the wake of his arrest cleared unlawful.”

In February 2020 Genesee Circuit Court Judge Joseph Farah granted an injunction banning the enforcement of the county’s drone ordinance. However, since the decision came out of a county court, the effect of that ruling was limited to that county. Greenblatt said other subdivisions of the state continued to have anti-drone ordinances on their books.

That need to engage in ongoing litigation across the state against those laws led to the formation of the MCDO.

“The Michigan Coalition of Drone Operators was formed specifically to represent drone operators in Michigan generally so that you didn’t have individual plaintiffs trying to sue counties all over the state of Michigan,” Greenblatt said.

The group was also successful in filing a similar suit against Ottawa County on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. The plaintiffs had hoped that a favorable decision on the appellate court level would establish a statewide precedent upholding the state’s pre-emption law. However, although the county appealed the decision to the Michigan Court of Appeals, the appeals court declined to hear the case.

“Scooch ahead another couple of years, and now we are faced with a number of political subdivisions in the state, including Mackinac Island, that have drone bans,” Greenblatt said. “The Department of Natural Resources in Michigan has a number of locations that ban the operation of drones.”

Despite their two favorable court rulings against county governments, the University of Michigan along with some other universities in the state, still maintains it has the right to prohibit drone flights above its extensive property holdings, said Ryan Latourette, one of the founders of the coalition.

“They basically said, ‘We’re not a county, we’re not a local government.  We don’t feel that we are a political subdivision of the state of Michigan. We don’t have to subscribe to any of their laws,’” he said. “Our group decided that we needed to challenge that.”

Last December, a “fly-in” the group planned to conduct over university property was halted by university officials. “They sent a pretty threatening letter to one of the members of MCDO. And that letter basically stated that they would jail anybody who showed up to fly,” said Latourette, an IT manager for the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget.

On June 3, the coalition filed a complaint against the university, seeking to overturn its drone ban, as a violation of both the state’s pre-emption law and federal aviation law. Latourette said the legislature had passed the pre-emption law to reinforce the FAA’s total jurisdiction of the national airspace.

“The FAA had said to everybody, ‘Look, you cannot create your own local ordinances, because what it does is it creates a patchwork quilt of regulation that actually endangers the national airspace rather than protects it,’” he said.

DroneLife sent an email seeking comment on the suit to the University of Michigan press office but had not received a reply as of press time.

Read more:

• North Carolina Drone Operator to Seek Further Review in First Amendment Lawsuit
• Washington State Lawsuit Blends Drone Law and Privacy Concerns
• Texas Drone Law Heads to Supreme Court: Key Free Speech Case in the Balance

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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.