Those takings for corporate benefit that I have seen have further problems besides the basic injustice and failure of government to protect the citizen’s right to his property.

There is a tremendous expense laid on the citizens for infrastructure. There has to be roads, schools, water lines, sewage, services, for all the new inhabitants, mostly out-of-area employees transferred to the new location. Not to mention crowded real estate development.

You commenters have missed these expenses.

Always, that I have seen, the corporation gets tax abatements so that it does not pay this expense.

In a few years, the corporation pulls out, leaving most of its imported employees behind, and the area devastated with high unemployment, high taxes, and the infrastructure (schools, roads, water, etc) in disrepair.

Any amount of money spent on a legal fight was worth the price.

He won.

…may lead local governments to be more skeptical of economic development condemnations…

Ah, hope springs eternal. I think the only solution would be to require the politicians to put up their own money in restitution to taxpayers when their schemes fall short.

A new coporate HQ will not “revitalize” this downtown. A WW2 style bombing will give the city a chance to start over from scratch.

I too am not terribly optimistic. In areas where there is any economic stagnation at all, let alone decline, most politicians will roll over and play dead to any corporation that makes pie in the sky promises. No one will ask for any conditions or terms because all the corporation has to do is say if you don’t like our proposal as is, we can take it somewhere else that will. That pretty much ends the discussion.

No politician wants to risk losing a multi-million project that will bring hundreds of jobs and increase property values. Doesn’t matter how viable or not the project is, just the promises alone are enough to push things through. Heck, I could propose some stupid project, and as long as I wear an expensive suit and have a really beautiful powerpoint presentation, I’ll get whatever I want. (And then, for the real kicker, I’ll offer that a few thousand dollars from the project will go towards building a children’s park. No one will be able to resist).

I’ve seen projects get approved on little more than that, and when they don’t produce the promised benefits (they never do, actually), no one seems to care. Afterall, some investment is better than none, right? And a few minimum wage jobs are better than none, right? Who cares if it cost the taxpayers millions — we have a few jobs!

it’s sickening how our local boards can be played off one another and how they consistently fall for it. And we taxpayers end up paying for these mistakes.

Don K: politicians prefer building new highways to repairing the ones we have already.

I don’t think this is a truism any longer. Check the stimulus spending. all they are doing here in Rhode Island (and I expect most everywhere else) is early repaving, redoing every intersection or traffic circle they can get their shovels on, and replacing the new signs we bought a couple years ago with new-new signs.

They have the political will to mortgage the taxpayers future but they won’t touch any environmental sacred cows — because they would get accused of messing with future. go figure . . .

We’ve got lots of highways that need building that got stopped by the environmentalists, not to new places but to connect places that already exist — like the state university for one, and our main tourist destination in Newport, for another. Hartford would be well served by actually putting the rest of rte. 84 on the map. But . . . who cares about Hartford. It’s just our pleasant little New England version of Chicago lately.

Or maybe they could at least have built a third bridge at every highway overpass so they could maintain the bridges without creating chokepoints all over the interstate.

One of the few areas I wouldn’t mind seeing a little bit of government ribbon cutting — experiments at private roads notwithstanding, that interestingly raise a doffermet species of eminent domain questions. At least the post roads are in the Constitution, keep health care private and build some more interstates, I could live with that. (and, of course when I say keep health care private, I also infer that we should no more allow big drug companies to capture local government organs for their own purposes, than we should allow government to nationalize health care.)

So Kelo has now been an all around black eye for economic development takings, but despite this evidence of abuse we’ve made but modest gains in correcting it. Still, I remain convinced that, inverse condemnation is a far worse problem.

I spent last evening with Palazzolo listening to his son Michael play Bass in the great New London Band, the Hoolios. The accordion player raises mice for Pfizer’s research operations. There probably is no New London band that doesn’t have a Pfizer employee on it, a much better contribution to the community. Adler should check them for a sunday song lyric, writer Jim Carpenter is a clever guy with a 40 something sensibility.

I have a habit of trying not to get close to people during their 15 minutes of fame and then drop ‘em for the next one. Not particularly efficient, but it gives you the required check on whether you are actually accomplishing anything, as well as a lot of friends if you’re a lonely heart like me.

If Kelo’s was the best loss we ever suffered, from a PR perspective, Palazzolo’s case is typical of how winning at the supreme court isn’t winning when it comes to takings. He is almost 10 more years down the road in the state courts and regulatory apparatus and no closer to any use of his property that he sought to develop in the early 1960s — and, of course, zero compensation.

Kelo is a farce. Palazzolo is a tragedy.

Brian

It’s the same reason politicians prefer building new highways to repairing the ones we have already.