Posted on 11/21/2016 9:39:47 AM PST by Kaslin
NOBODY MOVES to Carver, Mass., for its urban flair. The town is rural and quiet, thickly wooded with pine and cedar — the sort of place people move to when they have a hankering to raise chickens, grow vegetables, and luxuriate amid an abundance of open space.
It's also about as wet a place as you can find in Massachusetts. Half the town consists of wetland, much of it in the form of cranberry bogs. The cranberry industry has always been a Carver mainstay; in the 1940s, the town produced more of the tart little fruits than any other place on earth. Carver's appeal is more diversified today — visitors flock to the town for the train rides at the Edaville amusement park and the Renaissance-themed King Richard's Faire — but at heart, Carver is still cranberry country.
If town officials get their way, however, a great swath of rural Carver will be designated an "urban renewal area," and turned over to a private entrepreneur with plans to build a giant complex of warehouse and industrial-distribution facilities. The entrepreneur — a Boston-based company called Route 44 Development LLC — already owns a large piece of land in the area: a 127-acre parcel, known as the Whitworth Property, that has lain unused since a sand-and-gravel mining operation shut down in 2000. The parcel isn't much to look at; in a report last month, the Carver Redevelopment Authority described it as being littered with "debris, stumps and other materials, building slabs . . . generally unkempt and unsightly."
Like most towns, Carver wants to expand its tax base and promote new growth; not surprisingly, local officials couldn't be happier that a private developer wants to turn the old Whitworth Property into a valuable commercial asset. Homeowners living next to the property would be happy too — if that were all the developer had in mind.
But Route 44 Development's ambitions extend far beyond the borders of the Whitworth Property. With the active support of town officials, it intends to construct a 1.1 million-square-foot distribution center and two warehouses totaling nearly 800,000 square feet, swallowing up the land of numerous neighbors in the process. And if those neighbors don't want to leave? The developer is counting on the town to force them out, by seizing their property through eminent domain and turning it over to Route 44 Development.
Long before Carver residents had any hint of this, town officials and the developer were planning it in secret.
In a confidential letter to Carver's board of selectmen dated Jan. 20, 2015, the developer — who describes himself as a specialist in "eminent-domain cases" — wrote that his company had bought the Whitworth Property in order to build a large commercial facility on it, but understood that it wouldn't be possible to secure the needed state environmental approvals without acquiring the surrounding properties. He urged the town to make that happen through an "urban renewal" designation covering the whole area, and dangled the irresistible bait: "considerable real estate tax revenues." Carver's selectmen, meeting behind closed doors the same day, were keenly interested. "They need the Town to step in to help the development," the notes of their executive session read, "since all surrounding property is privately owned." (The letter and the notes were uncovered after a local homeowner filed an open records request.)
Town officials energetically set about putting the proposal in motion. But it was more than a year before residents learned of the peril to their property. In February 2016, a Carver official told the local paper that Town Hall would "plan to begin reaching out" to homeowners in mid-March. In fact, it wasn't until April — more than 14 months after Route 44 Development and the Carver selectmen were already making plans — that neighbors found out they could lose their homes.
Two owners have already thrown in the towel. Once their homes showed up on an "urban renewal" acquisition list, they decided to sell and spare themselves the misery of trying to fight a developer backed by Town Hall. But some neighbors don't want to go anywhere. Karen and Bruce Tuscher have lived in their home on Montello Street for almost four decades. Karen's father and grandfather owned the property before she did, and after Bruce got out of the Navy, he and Karen settled in to raise a family — which, in classic Carver fashion, included not just their daughter, but a whole menagerie: a pig, a Welsh pony, lambs, goats, and chickens.
The threat of losing their home to eminent domain would come as a shock to anyone, but in the Tuschers' case it is compounded by the fact that Bruce has multiple myeloma, a rare form of blood cancer. In July, as the couple was coming under pressure to sell out to the developer, Bruce was in the hospital, undergoing bone marrow replacement and chemotherapy.
"We would love to live in the home where we have been for 37 years," Karen told Carver's redevelopment authority. "We are not opposed to a business at the 127-acre parcel. We have seen many businesses on that land. My husband and I worked for one of them several years ago."
At best, eminent domain is an unfortunate necessity — a last resort when land is needed for a public purpose, such as building a new school or a highway. But when government takes private property in order to benefit a private developer, or when it threatens to do so, it abuses its power and betrays the citizens it is supposed to represent.
Eminent-domain abuse, sadly, isn't new. In its execrable Kelo decision, the Supreme Court left it up to states to protect individuals from having their property condemned at the behest of an influential private developer. Numerous states promptly enacted robust new protections for private property rights.
But not Massachusetts. Here homeowners remain at the mercy of large developers, and find themselves blindsided by government officials so tempted by "considerable real estate tax revenue" that they're willing to drive people from their homes to get it.
Somebody has a case of the Mondays.
Ummmmm, yeah,........I'm gonna need you to stay after 5 pm......................
I actually spent a day in Carver last month. The Edaville amusement park is or was a small old school little place out in the sticks with a gravel parking lot, but as of August of last year, they now have the one and only “Thomasland” amusement park in the work, all dedicated to Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends, much to the delight of my 4-year-old son! Would hate to see the town ruined like this . . .
Title here doesn’t match the article at Townhall (”Eminent Injustice in Cranberry Country”) and seems to be for a different article?
LOL, Office Space and The Holy Grail have a lot in common when it comes to mentioning references to them on threads...:)
I noticed that! But Jeff Jacoby is a good read...
This is not what Eminent Domain was for. On the other hand, for the company to make private and very lucrative offers, that’s fine.
We’ll give you a million dollars for your $300,000 piece of land. Where do I sign?
This is a liberal decision playing out in a liberal utopia.
From the linked article about the Kelo decision: "But five justices — John Paul Stevens, Steven Breyer, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Anthony Kennedy — decided otherwise." Kelo is a RAT policy.
From the article itself: "If anything good came of Kelo, it was the furious nationwide backlash, which led a number of states — Massachusetts, unfortunately not among them — to pass new laws protecting property owners from abusive eminent-domain takings." Care to take a guess as to the party in charge where those protections were enacted?
Therein lies the problem. I don’t think this type of industrial use would generate the kind of revenue for a developer that would justify paying a huge premium for the land.
If anything good came of the Kelo case, it was that the pharmaceutical company that was supposed to be the prime tenant in the project was a acquired by another giant firm ... so they didn’t need the space anymore and backed out of the deal. I believe the property is still vacant today generating $0 in tax revenue for the city of New London.
Tell the residences of Carver to stay out of expanding their cranberry production, Juneau & Monroe Counties, Wisconsin have that all sewn up.
I have a lot of connections to this story - I lived in Hanson, Mass for about 8 years, in the heart of cranberry country. I did some work for a sand and gravel company in Carver in the mid to late 80s, I wonder if it was the one this story mentioned. And I now live in the town where Edaville got most of it’s rolling stock, as a matter of fact I just bought a piece of land that includes about 300 feet of the old narrow gauge railroad bed.
I though that area was “God’s Country” until I moved up in the woods in Maine. Boy, this is God’s Country.
Then there’s no problem. The project does not continue. Find other land.
And, of course, the Kelo property has been bulldozed...
I forgot all about the Edaville Railroad!!! Of course, it has been half a century or more :)
Must have been a Hillary supporter...........
I bet!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.