If Juris Curiskis were a lawyer, he would have enough billable hours to charge his client maybe $50,000. But he’s an architect, working out of his home office with no legal training. His client is himself. That hasn’t deterred him from a three-year, against-all-odds legal attack on the way the city of Minneapolis charges property owners for street maintenance projects. Amazingly, without a lawyer, he persuaded the Minnesota Court of Appeals last year to reverse the trial court’s decision and keep his gripe alive. Since then, his case has been thrown out once again. But he’s drawing up the legal briefs to make his case, a second time, to the appellate court.

Curiskis, 71, has a pencil-thin white mustache, an accent from his native Latvia and deeply-held distaste for the way government uses the value of property to extract money from people. He built his house back in 1969 on a leafy cul de sac in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood, a suburban-style enclave that feels far from the city’s sometimes tedious grid.

His legal journey began in April 2005, when the city informed residents in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood that 29 streets would get new curbs and a “mill and overlay” renovation, and they would be assessed a total of $658,461.83 for a portion of the cost. Neighbors rose up in protest, saying many of their streets were plenty smooth and objecting to the varying assessments. Still, the Minneapolis City Council voted to move forward with the Bryn Mawr Street Renovation Project.

It’s not the repaving per se that galls Curiskis. It’s the way the city chose to assess for it, based on the total lot size, rather than a property’s actual frontage on the street. That resulted in wildly varying assessments for each property, from a low of $484 to a high of $7,956. Curiskis’s assessment was in the middle, at $3,295. But for him, that wasn’t the point.

The city argues that its method for assessing properties, in place since 1979, is a fair and legal system for making property owners pay based on the “benefit” that the projects bring. Curiskis says it’s arbitrary and illegal, that the city can’t prove that mere maintenance increases the market value of properties by the amount of the assessment.

“It’s a definite way of squeezing extra money without saying we’re raising your taxes,” Curiskis told me.

Led by Curiskis, property owners appealed the assessments en masse to Hennepin District Court. In September 2005, Judge John Q. McShane threw out all the cases except Curiskis’s.

Along the way, Curiskis was repeatedly reminded about the obstacles he faced as a non-lawyer seeking his day in court. A city lawyer warned him in a letter that attempting to represent others would amount to practicing law without a license, court records show. McShane, writing in his April 2006 decision to throw out Curiskis’s case, wrote that the “fact that Curiskis chose to represent himself pro se does not relieve him of the obligations set forth in the jurisdictional rules.”

First the city tried to get Curiskis’s argument thrown out on procedural grounds, that he’d missed the deadline for filing an appeal. McShane agreed. Curiskis researched and wrote the appeals court brief, saying the judge miscalculated the amount of time he had to appeal. In April 2007, the Court of Appeals agreed with Curiskis’s reading of the law and sent the case back to McShane.

In May 2008, McShane tossed out Curiskis’s case a second time. “It is clear that this pro se plaintiff believes that the process followed by the city was not fair,” the judge wrote. Nevertheless, the question was simply whether the assessment was legal, and McShane ruled that it was, because Curiskis’s “property received a benefit, that the assessment was uniform for the same class of property and that the benefit exceeded the assessment.”

Curiskis told me he thinks this appeal, due early next month, may be his last. That doesn’t mean he feels any less passionately about the way the city has treated him and other property owners. The roads have long been repaved and most of his neighbors have moved on. But Curiskis compares his situation to swimming across a river and getting so tired in the middle that he had to make a decision about whether to go back.

“I chose to go forward,” he said.

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