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Two Sides of Eminent Domain - Fort
Trumbull plaintiffs, NLDC make their cases in Hartford
July 29, 2005
By Ted Mann, Day Staff Writer, Politics/Government
The Day
New London, Connecticut
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Hartford, Connecticut - A legislative hearing Thursday on eminent
domain and New London's Fort Trumbull redevelopment plan was scheduled
to take three hours and run as smoothly as a first-year law lecture.
Instead, it took nearly five hours as attorneys on both sides of the dispute angrily hashed out the ideological and factual differences that carried the case of Susette Kelo, her neighbors and their city to the U.S. Supreme Court. For most of the legislators present, the hearing before the Planning and Development and Judiciary committees was a refresher course, a Cliffs Notes account of a years-long struggle that pitted municipal and state officials bent on renovating a threadbare corner of New London against a small band of holdouts who insist they simply want to keep their homes. Kelo was there with her fellow plaintiffs, trembling as she read from a prepared statement. She was consoled by Scott Bullock, the senior attorney at the nonprofit Institute for Justice, the libertarian law firm, who unsuccessfully argued the homeowners' case before the Supreme Court this spring. Officials of the New London Development Corporation and the city defended their seizure of 15 properties at Fort Trumbull, saying they had followed the applicable state law -- allowing government takings for the purpose of economic development -- to the letter, and had done so in a desperate attempt to save the city. They argued that the passionate dissent of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who warned that “the specter of condemnation hangs over all property,” has sown unreasonable fears nationwide. “I'm here to tell you that is not the case in the state of Connecticut,” said Thomas J. Londregan, the city attorney. “That is not your law. Your law does not say every home in Connecticut can be taken solely to give it to someone else who will pay more taxes. That is not your law.” Londregan and Michael Joplin, president of the NLDC, said the Fort Trumbull project made legitimate use of the state law permitting property seizures for economic development. But even some supporters of the project said they thought the statutes could be revised -- especially in the face of overwhelming public opposition to the Kelo decision. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday morning showed 89 percent of state voters want the General Assembly to restrict the state's power of eminent domain, with 61 percent opposed even to some of the traditional uses of eminent domain, including construction of roads and schools. “We have no doubt that there may be some changes forthcoming in the statutes,” said Joel Cogen, executive director and general counsel of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the NLDC in the Kelo case. “And we are not going to sit back and pretend that they are perfect in every particular.” Bullock proposed a modest overhaul of several statutes, including eliminating several of the dozens of clauses in the law that afford eminent domain power. Among those is Chapter 132 of the General Statutes, under which the NLDC, acting as the redevelopment agent of the city, has used funds from the state Department of Economic and Community Development for its work at Fort Trumbull. Bullock was alone among the invited panelists in opposing the Fort Trumbull project, but he got frequent support in the form of applause from some attending the hearing and in the sentiments expressed by a handful of lawmakers who said the specter of O'Connor's dissent is an all-too-real one. One, Sen. David Cappiello, R-Danbury, was bluntly critical of the eminent domain law used by the NLDC and the state Department of Economic and Community Development for the Fort Trumbull project, which he called an invitation to fraud and abuse. “We need to close this loophole so no municipalities can do this again,” Cappiello said. Meanwhile, Rep. DebraLee Hovey, R-Monroe, said the conversation among supporters of the New London project “scares me to death.” Hovey said the supporters had demonstrated what she called “flipness, what I would consider a cavalier attitude toward personal-property rights.” That description made Joplin bristle. The subject of the hearing, he said, amounted to half of the story: While the panel focused on the rights of individual landowners, he said, the desperate need of the city to generate revenue and support its citizens was being ignored. “We cannot afford to educate our children, and if it sounds flip when we talk about taking someone's house, that's because we're having half a conversation,” Joplin said. But that, Bullock responded, was “putting to you a false choice” between taking the remaining properties and generating commercial development on the rest of the NLDC's 90 acres at Fort Trumbull, which the property owners have said they would gladly see redeveloped around them. Thursday's forum was not the first time the committees have discussed changing eminent domain laws, but those earlier hearings attracted nowhere near as much attention, were sparsely attended by lawmakers and citizens alike, and ended with a resolution to wait until the Supreme Court had spoken about the battle between NLDC and the property owners of Fort Trumbull. The high court's eventual decision resulted in an outcry on radio waves and in statehouses around the country, including in Delaware, Texas and Alabama, which have all passed laws affecting, to vastly different degrees, each state's ability to seize private property. New London city officials, meanwhile, said they remain confident that no change by the Connecticut legislature will affect the city's efforts to complete the Fort Trumbull project.
Copyright 2005, The Day.
Additional related reading:
Two
Sides Of Eminent Domain
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