The merits of his argument aside, we are gratified to know that Joel Broida will finally get his day in court.

Overturning the decision of a lower court, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals last week ruled that Broida does have the right to bring a legal challenge to WCI Communities Inc.'s plan to put a 22-story condo in Town Center.

However legally sound it might've been, a previous ruling by county Hearing Examiner Thomas Carbo, which the courts have now taken up, defied common sense. It held that the Plaza Residences would not "specially aggrieve" Broida and other Columbia residents seeking to prevent the project's construction, and that therefore the plaintiffs lacked the necessary legal standing to fight it through judicial or quasi-judicial channels.

In other words, building the Plaza wouldn't hurt these people any more than anyone else, so they had no right to take WCI to court over it, according to Carbo.

Leaving aside the notion that any county taxpayer faced with the impact on roads, schools, sewer service and other public functions ought to be able to make a case against a project of this magnitude, one could argue that Broida's partners in the legal fight against the Plaza live too far away from the site to be injured by it.

But Broida lives practically on top of where the high-rise is to go. To say the Plaza could not harm him in any special way strains credulity. Fortunately, the state's second-highest court shot down such faulty logic, ruling that Broida's status as a neighboring resident gives him legal standing to oppose it.

Whether his case itself will hold water remains to be seen. But he will now get the opportunity to make it, and that's as it should be.

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