Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that your rights under the federal Constitution are not violated if the local government decides to take your property and sell it to someone who will pay more taxes.
The case arose in depressed New London, Conn., where pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in 1998 agreed to build a $270 million global research facility. It was near a neighborhood called Fort Trumball, and to make Pfizer happier, the New London City Council launched a redevelopment plan for 90 acres of Fort Trumball: conference center, hotels, offices, condos, etc.
The private non-profit New London Development Corp. would handle the deal. The city gave it the power of eminent domain, so that it could condemn property if the owners weren’t willing to sell.
Among those unwilling to sell was Susette Kelo, who was joined by six other Fort Trumball homeowners. They argued in state court that taking property from one private owner to transfer it to another was not a “public use.” The Connecticut Supreme Court found in favor of the city, and last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that this did not violate the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which states that “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor pointed out in her dissent, this just enhances the power of the wealthy, and it’s not as though they’re an oppressed group in this country. “The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. … The government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more.”
In a separate dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas observed that “These losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities … the least politically powerful.”
In a typical scenario, a corporation persuades a city government to go along with its scheme. For instance, Wal-Mart tried to get Arvada to condemn a lake so it could be filled in for a parking lot – something our state Supreme Court forbade, on a procedural issue concerning blight.
In another example, a baseball team wanted a new stadium and it persuaded the city government to condemn the land. And not just stadium land, but a few blocks next to it that would increase in value as a result of stadium construction. After that, the team owners sold out for a handsome profit on account of the fine new stadium – one of those owners, a Texan named G.W. Bush, thereby parlayed a $600,000 investment into a $15 million profit and a political career.
But in the New London case, the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t really have much choice, unless it wanted to federalize every eminent-domain case in the country. Traditionally the federal courts have left it to the states to define “private property” and to elected bodies, like legislatures and city councils, to define “public use.”
And that’s basically what the court did this time – if the New London City Council defined “condemning private homes so the property can be sold to a hotel developer so that Pfizer has a spiffy place to put up visiting executives” as a “public use,” and the Connecticut courts agreed, then the federal Supreme Court wasn’t going to step into that.
So how to prevent the rich from using government to take anything they want? Our legislature has put some limitations on its condemnation powers in recent years, and that’s a good step.
But it’s best if local governments don’t even try to condemn land for the benefit of some multinational – and that means we should watch them closely, vote carefully in local elections, and recall them quickly whenever they confuse “public use,” like a school or road or park, with “public benefit,” like increased sales-tax revenue because a big box will generate more money than a ma-and-pa hardware store.
Or, as the saying goes, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
