Is anyone listening? That’s the question posed by Tim Calnen a lobbyist from the Connecticut Association of Realtor, in Brian Lockhart’s Norwalk Advocate article:.

The legislature’s joint Planning and Development Committee held its first public hearing last night on two bills aimed at reforming existing state laws. One was generated by the committee, another by Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

Originally scheduled for 2 p.m., the hearing was delayed until about 6 p.m. because of lengthy House and Senate sessions.

“I think we’re expected to get something through,” state Rep. Gerald Fox III, D-Stamford, a committee member, said afterward. “And I believe we will.”

Eminent domain reform became a priority in 2005 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that New London could take homes in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood to make way for a waterfront project slated to include condominiums, a hotel and office space.

But legislators did not reach an agreement in the 2006 session. This year, the eminent domain rhetoric has been replaced by Democrats’ and Republicans’ calls to reform state energy, health care and education policies.

“This has been too slow a process,” Tim Calnen, a lobbyist from the Connecticut Association of Realtors, told the committee last night.

Calnen said association members and the public have become more cynical about whether the state would ever act.

“Is anyone listening?” he said.

So why such a slow process? The reasons are mutifold. Development temporarily increases a towns revenue base masking the inefficiencies of relying on an antiquated property tax system. But the economic impact that developments are not always the pot of gold that are often promised. It seems odd for proponents to suggest that the market is inefficient at determining fair value for a property. It seems odd too, that of all places in the world, American government is essentially saying one property owner is better than another solely on the basis of promises made. Famously, as the example of Poletown in Michigan illustrates, once a seizure takes place, there is nothing stopping abandonment once the economic vitally of a project has been sucked dry. The CBS
60 Minutes report on eminent domain seizures in Cleveland and Arizona also provide an overview on the harm eminent domain abuse can cause.

Governor Rell thinks it’s high time for the legislature to act on eminent domain:

“It is time to send a clear message and put restrictions on the ability to take people’s property for economic development purposes,” Rell said in a statement. “I think both Democrats and Republicans would agree that the issue of property seizures has been put off for far too long and talked to death.”

Rell’s proposal would allow the seizure of private property after a municipality’s legislative body approves the measure in a two-thirds vote.

She also said she wants to require municipalities to determine that public benefits resulting from economic development outweigh private benefits and that the acquisition by eminent domain is “reasonably necessary” to achieve the objectives of the development plan. source:

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