Pfizer, Inc., announced this week that the company will be closing its former research and development headquarters in New London, Conn. — the project for which the city of New London infamously used its power of eminent domain to seize and ultimately bulldoze the homes of Susette Kelo and her neighbors, after that seizure was OK\u2019d by the U.S. Supreme Court in its highly controversial ruling \u201cKelo v. City of New London.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was the same bogus development plan that five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court refused to question when the property owners of New London pleaded to have their homes spared from the wrecking ball,\u201d noted John Kramer of the Institute for Justice, the libertarian public interest law firm that represented Ms. Kelo and also filed a brief supporting the Pappas family in their related case, here in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, more than four years after the redevelopment scheme passed constitutional muster — allowing government to take land from one private owner only to hand that land over to another private party who happens to have more political influence — the plant that had been the magnet for the development is closing its doors and the very land where Susette Kelo\u2019s home once stood remains barren to all but feral cats, seagulls and weeds,\u201d Mr. Kramer wrote Monday.<\/p>\n
(As part of its final settlement, the city of New London paid to have the Kelo home disassembled and moved elsewhere in the city. Most of the other homes and buildings on the 90-acre site were demolished.)<\/p>\n
Scott Bullock, who argued the Kelo case for the Institute for Justice, said, \u201cToday\u2019s announcement … demonstrates the folly of government plans that involve massive corporate welfare and that abuse eminent domain for private development. The majority opinion in Kelo v. New London described the Fort Trumbull project as a \u2018carefully considered\u2019 plan, but it has been an unmitigated disaster from start — and now — to finish.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bullock continued, \u201cProject supporters blame the economic downturn for this turn of events. That is all the more reason why taxpayer dollars should not be put at risk in speculative and risky development schemes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whether intended or not, much good was to eventually come from the wrongheaded Kelo ruling.<\/p>\n
Dana Berliner, a senior attorney with the IJ and co-counsel in the Kelo case, points out \u201cIn the face of the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s Kelo ruling, 43 states have now reformed their laws to better protect property owners. What\u2019s more, seven state high courts have stepped in post-Kelo to protect the rights of homeowners against eminent domain abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here in Nevada, the local case that led voters to enact the PISTOL initiative — the People\u2019s Initiative to Stop the Taking of our Lands, spearheaded by former District Judge Don Chairez and local eminent domain attorney Kermit Waters — was the Pappas case.<\/p>\n
Caliope \u201cCarol\u201d Pappas, 81, widow of John Pappas, died here Oct. 22, bringing an end of sorts to the saga.<\/p>\n
During the Second World War, Mrs. Pappas recalled that her family\u2019s property was taken by the Nazis.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter the war everyone wanted to come to American where we thought our freedom and our property were secure,\u201d Mrs. Pappas said after the property seizure. \u201cWhere the Nazis stole our property at the point of a bayonet, here they do it with eminent domain. …\u201d<\/p>\n
Following her husband\u2019s death in 1981, Mrs. Pappas\u2019 income here was from the local properties in which she and her husband had invested, primarily a downtown block along Las Vegas Boulevard just south of Fremont Street.
\nBut then-mayor Jan Jones and the Las Vegas City Council seized that property under eminent domain in 1993, Mayor Jones famously telling Mrs. Pappas, \u201cYou\u2019ve had the property long enough. Time to give someone else a turn.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mrs. Pappas had to stand peering through a chain-link fence as the businesses, which provided her with more than $60,000 a year in rental income, were bulldozed.<\/p>\n
The city offered $380,000, then $480,000, for a block which was zoned for \u201cunlimited gaming.\u201d<\/p>\n
As in the Kelo case, eminent domain was used to grab the land not for some needed bridge or firehouse — the traditional justifications for the power — but rather to transfer the property to other, better-connected private owners — in this case, a consortium of downtown casino owners organizing the Fremont Street Experience LLC.<\/p>\n
This private combine built a parking garage on the site, though the garage proved unnecessary for tourists visiting the Fremont Street attraction, leading the Pappas family to speculate the real reason for the seizure was to prevent construction of a competing casino on the family\u2019s land, as Bob Snow of Florida had been blocked from doing just a few years before.<\/p>\n
After an 11-year court battle, the city in 2004 ended up paying $4.5 million for the supposedly \u201c$380,000\u201d property.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Pappas family used to get invited to these \u2018Las Vegas pioneer\u2019 dinners,\u201d recalled her son, Harry. \u201cAfter the eminent domain, those invitations stopped coming. Her health was never the same after that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat thing sat 90 percent empty for years,\u201d Harry told the Review-Journal. \u201cThey didn\u2019t need parking. That\u2019s just the B.S. they fed the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur founders certainly weren\u2019t thinking of casinos when they wrote the words \u2018public use,\u2019\u201d observes Dana Berliner of the IJ, which declared the Pappas case among the top 10 abuses of eminent domain, nationwide.<\/p>\n
The bad publicity generated by the Pappas case, which went to the U.S. Supreme Court but was rejected in favor of \u201cKelo v. City of New London,\u201d finally forced the city of Las Vegas to abandon eminent domain in situations where land is transferred from one private party to another, even in the name of redevelopment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pfizer, Inc., announced this week that the company will be closing its former research and development headquarters in New London, Conn. — the project for which the city of New London infamously used its power of eminent domain to seize and ultimately bulldoze the homes of Susette Kelo and her neighbors, after that seizure was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private-property"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-5U","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":367,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions\/367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}