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To: AmishDude
The problem is that this comes out of the railroad rulings in the 1800s.

One could argue a military (i.e. national security) issue for railroads, at least in the past. I think the interstate highway system was put in place and federally funded exactly so that tanks could move around if necessary.

Stadia have a similar problem. They need many acres of contiguous land. (Parking, etc.)

They are not essential for national defense nor for essential government services. True, they "need" a lot of land, but people living in a free country "need" property rights too.

Your idea of "just compensation" is interesting, but it ultimately inshrines this bad idea of ED into law. For "public use" the value of property often goes down or is unable to be properly assessed (a public park, for example) because it cannot be used privately.

That's a good point, but there are plenty of examples where a landowner is evicted so the city can rezone to more valuable land, allowing a developer to cash in at the former landowner's expense. Maybe a good solution would be to stipulate that "just compensation" is for FMV if the land will be zoned to a less-valuable state after the ED taking, but is for FMV after the planned rezoning, if it is rezoned to a more-valuable state. (But, no fair rezoning to a garbage dump for the purpose of minimal "just compensation", and then rezoning again to office space after the 1-year-and-1-day deadline passes, stiffing the landowner.)

112 posted on 06/24/2005 2:52:43 PM PDT by coloradan (Hence, etc.)
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To: coloradan
One thing I haven't heard is that a long-thinking government could take land for one purpose -- a park -- and several years later, make luxury condos out of it. The real disincentive to this is the "just compensation" part.

It would be interesting for an enterprising lawyer to argue that "just compensation" can be calculated from the revenue expected from the recipient. I don't know that it hasn't been done already.

Oh, Eisenhower designed the highway system so that planes could land there in an emergency. That is why the highways have several miles of perfectly straight road, then twist and turn, and go straight again.

114 posted on 06/24/2005 3:05:02 PM PDT by AmishDude (Once you go black hat, you never go back.)
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