This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A home builder in Seattle has won a fight against the city's "extortion," demands for $350,000 payment for a water line the project didn't need and wouldn't use.

In fact, the water line the city demanded Oom Living fund wasn't even in his neighborhood.

The results of the fight were announced by the Pacific Legal Foundation.

"The ruling is a great win for a small company that is trying to build new houses in a city where there is an obvious, and desperate, need for them," explained PLF lawyer Brian Hodges.

"The city's demands were nothing more than an exorbitant ransom to receive permission to connect to a public water line, which is necessary to live in a home. Such demands violate the owner's civil rights."

He said with the ruling, "Seattle cannot abuse its power to withhold water connection approvals to force individual property owners to pay for infrastructure that's unrelated to their building project. This victory for home builders and homebuyers will stop the city from shifting unnecessary costs onto the purchase price of new homes."

The ruling in the court fight said the Seattle Public Utilities "arbitrarily and unconstitutionally attempted to force the company to pay for an unnecessary water main in order to build the new house."

The city utility said the building could hook up the new home to the water utility, but only after paying for the new line.

The new line was to address a historic problem with the city's infrastructure, to which the new home had no connection.

"Under SPU's policy, it didn't matter that Oom Living's home fronted an existing water main with ample supply, nor did it matter that the new water main would dead-end in a fully built-out neighborhood that has no need for new pipes. Nor did it even matter that the city's demands would have cost the company over $350,000—a cost that would massively increase the home's ultimate purchase price."

The ruling came from Superior Court of Washington for King County, which told the city it was not allowed to hold the development of a new home hostage to demands for payment for unrelated infrastructure.