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High Court Expands Reach of Eminent Domain


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Say the grand parents of one of your friends purchased, or even built, a house in what was then a rural area, miles from the nearest town. Today the house belongs to your friend and sits 20 feet away from a two-lane highway that backs up with motorists and bicyclists every day. The next nearest route would add about 7 miles to the trip between downtown and the suburbs. And the foundation of the house is about 8 feet higher than the street. During rush-hour, motorists can usually keep moving faster than most cyclists are able. Traffic wise, the best solution to this problem would be to widen the road. A wider outside through lane can give motorists sufficient room to pass cyclists in the same lane when the oncoming traffic lane remains blocked for several minutes at a time. Currently, this road has only one narrow through lane per direction and a posted speed limit of 45 miles per hour.

As a bicycle driver on that road during rush-hour, I would occupy the center of the only available narrow through lane at a speed that I could maintain for several minutes. Although I have the first-come-first-serve right-of-way to hold my position in the lane, I would, out of courtesy, pull off the road after one or more motorists have been waiting behind me for more than 30 seconds. This does not mean that bicyclists should not use that road, it just means that that particular road is not sufficiently designed to conveniently accommodate both motorists and cyclists at the same time in rush-hour conditions.

Now here is where your friend's house comes in. A permanent fix would be to widen the road so that motorists could pass cyclists in the same through lane, without changing lanes. To do that on this particular road, the pavement would need to be widened on each side by about 6 or 7 feet.

As a motorist who passes by that house on his way home but doesn't own it or even live near it, would you rather

  1. wait 30 seconds behind each cyclist and possibly spend up to 15 minutes longer getting home? or
  2. pettition your local government to widen that arterial road, and forcefully take a 5 or 10 foot strip of land away from that private property owner to do so?

Banning bicyclists from that section of road is not an option because the rules of the road in every US state (and of many governments across the world) clearly say that all drivers of all types of vehicles (bicycles and motor vehicles) have the exact same rights to use all non-controlled-access roads and must operate by a single set of rules.

Today, the US Supreme Court ruled for choice B; it would rather take away the entire property to widen that road.

Link

I usually do not post in this community about anything but the game, my Christian faith and, when it effects the Fleets, my real life. But taking away people's private property for a "more profitable use" is just outrageous!

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I ran out of time to edit my post above.

The ruling appears to permitt seizing private property in return for other private development (like shopping malls). But the flood gates are now open, and the situation I cite above might not be far behind.

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If it was their land that was in question, I'm quite willing to bet that law wouldn't have even been considered.

It puts steam under my collar too, hearing something like that...but I'm not a rich SOB who has a multi-million dollar home and drives a Mercedes Benz or Porshe around either, so they wouldn't look twice at me....on the other-hand though, they would if I had a stick of dynamite and a match, but then promptly deem me as insane and take the land anyways.

Just goes to show really...money seems to make the world go round, dont it?

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There is going to be a heated battle with the individual states some have greater protection for property owners than the federal government does.

Haven't read up on this issue yet but is there property value compensation? If there isn't, there should be. The property should not just be taken away.

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The problem is not the money, the problem is with government. They are a bunch of looters that's all. It will get worse too, Russian social communism has started the EXACT same way. It's called "in the best public interest", however, it never mentions who is the public and who defined their interests. The aristocracy of pull (beurocrats and polliticians who do each other favors, and back scratching deals) defines their interests as "public". While all they do is rape the citizens and businesses, and everyone else suffers in the end.

Atlas Shrugged...

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What!?.....

A semi liberal attitude from Soback?

OK.....Let me check out 'Atlas Shrugged'

Hmm....maybe we only two or three pages away.

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quote:

but I'm not a rich SOB who has a multi-million dollar home and drives a Mercedes Benz or Porshe around either, so they wouldn't look twice at me....

You misunderstand. You are EXACTLY the person who is affected by this ruling.

This is about taking normal bedroom community homes and small businesses that pay single-family and single-business taxes, and handing them over to developers to build condos, hotels, and offices that pay orders of magnitude more in taxes. They're not going to seize the mansion in the exclusive part of town, they're going to seize the average homes in order to create more revenue-generating parts of town.

The bottom line is that this about governments taking your property because you weren't using it in a way that maximizes its value to the government.

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Payback time.

quote:

WEARE, N.H. -- Following a Supreme Court ruling last week that gave local governments power to seize private property, someone has suggested taking over Justice David Souter's New Hampshire farmhouse and turning it into a hotel.

"The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare," Logan Darrow Clements of California wrote in a letter faxed to town officials in Weare on Tuesday.


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And so it begins: Link

quote:

NAPLES, Florida (AP) -- A man who fought the government for years to keep his home in the rural Everglades has reluctantly picked up his $4.18 million settlement check.

Jesse Hardy said he doesn't know where he'll go after his Dec. 1 deadline to move. "I'm just trying to enjoy every minute I can of what I have left out there," he said.

The 69-year-old former Navy SEAL lives in a clapboard home he built on 160-acre property with no electricity or infrastructure about 40 miles east of Naples.

State officials went to court to take the land using eminent domain, saying the property sits in the path of an $8.4 billion Everglades restoration. Construction crews are scheduled to start filling in canals and tearing apart roads on Hardy's land in 2006.

Hardy had rejected repeated offers to sell, saying that he wanted to hold onto a dying rural lifestyle and pass it on to the 9-year-old boy he has raised on the land with the boy's mother.

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