City of Woburn v. McNutt Bros. Equipment Corp.

The individual defendants own land upon which they operate a heavy equipment contracting business . The land is located in an area of Woburn that is zoned for residential use. Sometime in 1979 or 1980, a dispute began between the city council and the building inspector as to whether the defendants’ operating, parking, storing, and repairing of dump trucks, front-end loaders, and other vehicles and equipment on their premises constituted, as the building inspector had concluded, a “legal nonconforming *237operation,” in existence prior to the enactment of the 1970 Woburn zoning ordinance, or, as…