U.S. gives Flight 93 site landowners one week to sell (Update #14, Nixed)

Philadelphia Inquirer ^ | 6/6/09 | Amy Worden

[jimbo123]

The federal government issued an ultimatum yesterday to people who own land designated for the Flight 93 memorial in Western Pennsylvania: They have one week to reach an agreement on the sale of their land or the government will initiate proceedings to seize it.

[Gatún(CraigIsaMangoTreeLawyer)]

It’s time folks meet the grabbers with pitchforks and some hot lead.

There has to be a tipping point where enough is enough.

[nathanbedford]

That is an interesting twist. Are they offering to donate a limited area, probably where the plane impacted, to convince the government not to condemn the rest? An interesting approach.

The question whether the government is taking too much land gets us close to the Kelso case in which the land owners would be asking the court to rule that the taking is not for a public purpose and therefore not authorized by the Constitution. The evidence that it is not a taking for a "public" purpose, I presume, is that the government is condemning an unreasonably large area. I'm not sure that conclusion follows in logic. Surely the government would say that it needs parking areas and space for infrastructure and especially a green buffer properly to memorialize the site. Should the court substitute its judgment for the judgment of the Congress or the administrators whom the Congress designates? Would not that call for the kind of judicial activism we conservatives deplore?

I do not raise these points as a matter of justice but out of intellectual interest. In justice, the landowners might be perfectly right the government is perhaps being too broad in its seizure, but do we want judges to be making these decisions in the absence of a flagrant departure from reasonableness?

[Cheetahcat]

Why are the Idiots doing this ? it needs to be with the rest of the memorials in NYC.

[Cheetahcat]

I got that picture with a bucket of KFC on the floor.

[Vaduz]

Sale of their land or the government will initiate proceedings to seize it.So long freedom it was nice to have known you.

[TankerKC]

almost perfectly ≠ exactly

Which is it, I wonder.

[Cicero]

What it means is that the crescent is aligned toward Mecca, so Muslim visitors know which direction to pray in. The whole thing appears to be a Muslim shrine of some sort—bizarre.

[Mount Athos]

It makes me furious and sick to my stomach that this thing is a muslim crescent. That’s not a stretch, that’s exactly what it is. Sick bastards are laughing at us.

[JerseyJohn61]

The Hijackers seized privately owned air crafts
with many private citizens aboard.

Now the Gov is going to seize privately owned
land in order to “honor” these events.

????????????makes sense to me???????????????

JJ61

[annieokie]

good point.

[Never on my watch]

Well a small monument would only require one part-time Park Ranger.
This one will require a staff the size of an Army battalion and a 30 bureaucrats to oversee them.

[WKUHilltopper]

Good point.

[org.whodat]

Problem is the Park Service wants to build a 5000 acre Park for their staff with golf courses, etc, etc. I guess!! The land owner was willing to give them a couple of acres. But no someone wants to make a fortune off of the backs of those that died and build a tourist attraction instead of a “Marker of Honor”.