In Ehrlich v. City of Culver City (1996) 12 Cal.4th 854, the owner of a private recreational facility, whose parcel was restrictively zoned for commercial recreational use, sought a zoning change to build condominiums. The city agreed to rezone the property but required an in-lieu fee of $280,000 for the development of new recreational facilities elsewhere. (Ehrlich, supra, 12 Cal.4th at p. 862.) The court found the requisite nexus between the loss of recreational facilities and the imposition of an in-lieu mitigation fee to develop new ones. (Id. at pp. 881-882 (plur. opn. of Arabian, J.).) However, the court concluded that the amount of the fee was not roughly proportional to the impact of the zoning change. The court noted the lack of "individualized findings" to establish a connection between the amount of the fee and the loss of the restrictive zoning on the parcel. The city argued that the fee was partial compensation for the loss of $800,000 in recreational improvements on the property. However, the court pointed out that the impact to be mitigated was the loss of the restrictive zoning not the loss of recreational improvements on the property. (Ehrlich, supra, 12 Cal.4th at p. 883 (plur. opn. of Arabian, J.).) The city also asserted that if it had denied the zoning change, four new private tennis courts would have been built. Thus, the zoning change resulted in the loss of four new courts, and the fee represented the cost of building them. The court again found the amount of the fee unjustified because the cost of private courts would have been paid by the members of the private club, and the general public would not have had access to them. "Thus, under the city's formula, the public would receive, ex gratia, $280,000 worth of recreational facilities the cost of which it would otherwise have to finance through membership fees. The owner is being asked to pay for something that should be paid for either by the public as a whole, or by a private entrepreneur in business for a profit. The city may not constitutionally measure the magnitude of its loss, or of the recreational exaction, by the value of facilities it had no right to appropriate without payment." (Ibid. (plur. opn. of Arabian, J.).) The court opined, however, that the city could impose a fee that was "tied more closely to the actual impact of the land-use change the city granted plaintiff," such as a fee to help defray the administrative cost of rezoning other property for commercial recreational use, or a fee to mitigate a decrease in the city's ability to attract private recreational development and defray the costs of inducing such development. (Ehrlich, supra, 12 Cal.4th at p. 884 (plur. opn. of Arabian, J.).) In addition, although the city could not have required the owner to dedicate the same amount of land for public recreational facilities, it could require the owner to transfer the former zoning designation to a comparable property that the owner had, which could then induce the development of another private recreational facility at that site. And if such a transfer were impractical, then the city could "surely levy an in-lieu exaction to accomplish the same objective. Such a fee would serve the same purpose as do all development fees: providing the city with a means of escaping the narrow choice between denying plaintiff his project permit altogether or subordinating legitimate public interests to plaintiff's development plans." (Ibid. (plur. opn. of Arabian, J.).) The Court upheld a development permit that required a fee for art in public places as a condition of issuance. Thus, the city in that case exacted a fee for land use. The high court found this fee "akin to traditional land-use regulations imposing minimal building setbacks, parking and lighting conditions, landscaping requirements, and other design conditions such as color schemes, building materials and architectural amenities. Such aesthetic conditions have long been held to be valid exercises of the city's traditional police power, and do not amount to a taking merely because they might incidentally restrict a use diminish the value, or impose a cost in connection with the property." (Id. at p. 886.) The California Supreme Court observed that the "broadly formulated and unqualified authorization" of section 66021 was "consistent with the view that the Legislature intended to require all protests to a development fee that challenge the sufficiency of its relationship to the effects attributable to a development project--regardless of the legal underpinnings of the protest--to be channeled through the administrative procedures mandated by the Mitigation Fee Act." (12 Cal.4th at p. 866.) The Court held that a "mitigation fee" of $ 280,000 imposed by a local government and paid under protest by the property owner, as a condition of development of a property, and as a "replacement" for the recreational facilities formerly operated on the property, should be subjected to heightened scrutiny as a possible taking, because the government may have used its discretionary power over the granting or denying of permits as a means of "leverage" in order to extract a monetary fee from the property owner. As Ehrlich reasoned, "such a discretionary context presents an inherent and heightened risk that local government will manipulate the police power to impose conditions unrelated to legitimate land use regulatory ends, thereby avoiding what would otherwise be an obligation to pay just compensation. . . . It is the imposition of land-use conditions in individual cases, authorized by a permit scheme which by its nature allows for both the discretionary deployment of the police power and an enhanced potential for its abuse, that constitutes the sine qua non for application of the intermediate standard of scrutiny formulated by the court in Nollan and Dolan." (Ehrlich, supra, at p. 869.)