Voice of the Coast

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Susette Kelo vs City of New London case was delivered on June 23 and runs to 48 pages. I’m not going to bore you with detailed analysis. You can read it for yourself at:

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=04-108#opinion1.

But I do want to address the fact that this decision has greatly increased governmental powers in the exercise of Eminent Domain - the Taking of private property for “public use” under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Ammendment to the Constitution - and neither I nor millions of other people in the United States are happy about it. Essentially, the Decision allows governmental bodies to use the mere prospect of increased revenue from a prospective development under transferred ownership to be sufficient to meet the test of “public use”.

Excuse me, but I think the Justices got all tangled in their robes on this one. Just think how that power could play out in small cities across the United States. Sam the Buggy-whip Maker convinces his buddies at the Lesser Peoria City Hall to “take” the Toyota carlot next to his factory so he can increase buggy-whip production. City Hall predicts a revenue increase and the taking is done. The buggy-whip market goes soft, however, so poor old Sam has to build condos on the property instead. Darndest thing, that buggy-whip market. Hard to to predict.

Except when used for roadbuilding, the citizens of Half Moon Bay have had an historical antipathy to Eminent Domain, the most vivid example of which was the twoto- one thumping they gave to the North Wavecrest Redevelopment project in 1995. They went along with the South Wavecrest Redevelopment in the early 90s because it didn’t involve “tax-increment financing” but even that went a bit astray when the Eminent Domain cost projections proved to be underestimated and the City ended up foregoing $2 million in revenue to make up for it.

In almost every state in the Union, there are movements to create laws reducing the impacts of the Kelo Decision. Many of them are, in my opinion, a mixed bag and might create more problems than they would solve, but most of those movements will be played out at the State government level rather than the City level.

So what can we do about this at the City level? We can’t overrule the U.S. Supreme Court and we can’t constrain the State. But we can, if we choose to, pass an Advisory Measure - hopefully by a big margin - advising future City Councils that the citizenry of this City emphatically do not want their City government to take anyone’s property solely on the Kelo Decision’s basis of predicted higher future revenue as constituting “public use”.

The City Council has asked the City Attorney to present a draft of such a measure at the next Council Meeting on August 1. If the wording adequately reflects the intentions of the Council we’ll put it on the ballot. Maybe we’ll have something to vote on in November that will bring all of us together, if only for that moment.