Kelo Report

[error]

"It's an unfortunate thing,'' Rinehart said. "Law enforcement is one big family, and when these things happen to our brothers and sisters, these things affect us all.''

Pick that one apart.

Obviously criminals wearing badges aren't responsible for their actions; they're afflicted with something. Something happened to them. That's why other police have to protect them. It's not their fault man! Society made them do it!

[Lloyd Danforth]

Reminds me of lyrics from a West Side Story song, Only this time Officer Krupke has a 'social disease'.

"
Officer Krupke

We're down on our knees

RIFF

'Cause no one wants a fella

With a social disease

JETS

Dear Officer Krupke

What are we to do?

Gee, Officer Krupke

Krup you"

[Jim Johnson]

http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=4d5acfca-6818-4a72-b987-7314f7ef3a28

Little Pink House' stays grounded in New London
       Published on 1/30/2009

The U.S. Supreme Court stoked a populist uproar when it ruled in 2005 that New London could bulldoze the working class Fort Trumbull neighborhood and replace it with a commercial district that would bring jobs, tax revenue and a newly gentrified gleam to the struggling city. Eminent domain suddenly took its place among abortion and affirmative action as the legal issue that roused people's deepest convictions about right and wrong.

With the furor over Kelo v. New London long since faded from editorial pages and talk radio, Jeff Benedict gives us an even-handed account of the politics and personal rivalries that produced the most talked-about case of 2005. His much-awaited "Little Pink House" is in bookstores.

LITTLE PINK HOUSE

Jeff Benedict

Grand Central Publishing

416 pages

$26.99

The book opens with a hearing about eminent domain on Capitol Hill, but its focus is relentlessly local. This turns out to be its great strength and its great weakness. Benedict does a wonderfully vivid job sketching the personalities that contribute to New London's rowdy civic life, and readers who follow local politics will delight in seeing these familiar figures writ large on the printed page.

Benedict dramatizes the story as a conflict between two women who are alike only in their bullheadedness. The first of his leading ladies is Claire Gaudiani, the flamboyant president of Connecticut College who persuades Pfizer to build its new research headquarters in New London and then concocts a plan to remake nearby Fort Trumbull to better comport with its corporate neighbor. Her main obstacle is Susette Kelo, the nurse who refuses to give up her pink cottage, the symbol of her hard-fought independence from a loveless marriage, to Gaudiani's grand designs.

Kelo comes off as a sympathetic everywoman who wages a noble battle against City Hall, but she is less interesting as a character study than the operatic Gaudiani. I could never decide whether Gaudiani was motivated by ambition or some misbegotten sense of altruism when she tried to knock down Fort Trumbull, a project she claimed would bring social justice to New London in the forms of jobs, tax revenue and economic momentum. Her arrogance was such that she did not grasp the irony that her experiment in social uplift would displace the sort of working class people she was ostensibly trying to help.

In one telling incident, shortly before she is run out of Connecticut College by a faculty revolt, Gaudiani opens the Hartford Courant magazine to find an unflattering profile of herself by a reporter whom she had trusted. Rather than use the occasion for self-reflection, Gaudiani assumes the writer undercut her because she was jealous of her good looks and professional stature. Was this self-defense? Utter delusion? Whatever the case, her brash, polyhedric personality gives the book its narrative drive.

By building his book around the bitter divisions Gaudiani incited, Benedict gives us a key insight into what went wrong with the Fort Trumbull project. The standoff between Gaudiani, Kelo and their respective supporters devolved into an intractable war of personality that all but foreclosed the possibility of compromise, even when reasonable solutions were on the table. At some point, what was good for New London was subordinated to the personal rivalries between its citizens.

The turning point in the saga comes when New London's pragmatic mayor, Lloyd Beachy, gathers together the feuding parties and nearly engineers an amicable settlement. A pair of activists, John and Sarah Steffian, have become so disillusioned by Gaudiani and her enterprise that they thwart a compromise by refusing to drop a series of obstructionist lawsuits. Acrimony prevails, and the Fort Trumbull project is consigned to a long slog of litigation and hard feelings that one resident compares to a seven-year prostate exam.

Benedict narrates this byzantine tale with short chapters and brisk dialogue that make for an engaging read. I finished "Little Pink House" in a matter of days, unable to put it down once I became engrossed in scenes that seemed new and fresh even though I had witnessed them as a reporter. But while the book succeeds as a page-turner, it falls shorts in its analysis of the Supreme Court decision and its implications beyond New London.

Benedict tarries for only a few brief sentences on the content of the majority opinion. This strikes me as a crucial oversight because much of the press - goaded by the libertarian law firm that represented Kelo and her neighborhoods - portrayed it as an assault on the American birthright of ownership. Many lawyers, and certainly the five justices that made up the majority, did not see it that way.

A few months before the court released the Kelo decision, the journalist and law professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote a cover story in the New York Times magazine about an effort by libertarian interest groups to roll back a host of government regulations. The Institute for Justice, the firm that represented Kelo and her neighbors, figured prominently in the article, but Benedict gives his readers barely a whiff of the group's political agenda. The Kelo case might have started as a tiff redolent with local politics, but it became a pawn in a high-stakes war of ideas.

The Institute for Justice lost the case before the Supreme Court, but it ultimately won the war with a shrewd press campaign that helped push eminent domain, an esoteric topic of concern to bureaucrats and academics, into the forefront of public consciousness. Dozens of state legislatures restricted eminent domain takings in the wake of the Kelo decision, and I would have liked Benedict to explore the implications of these furious changes in the law. The uproar over property rights has had a dramatic and sometimes deleterious effect on the way hurricane recovery has taken shape in New Orleans, where I have lived since 2005.

The Fort Trumbull imbroglio ceased to be a purely local story the moment the Supreme Court accepted the case for review. "Little Pink House" is a great achievement as a piece of local reporting, but Benedict would have produced a truly important book if he had widened his viewfinder and showed how the case has redounded beyond New London.

KATE MORAN IS AN EDITOR AND REPORTER FOR THE TIMES-PICAYUNE IN NEW ORLEANS. HER COVERAGE OF EMINENT DOMAIN FOR THE DAY WON NUMEROUS JOURNALISM AWARDS.

[Sam A. Robrin]

The green shirted police officer near the end of Lauren's porch arrest video has been accused of horrible horrible things

Well, let's get together and pick out a card we can all sign and send to him . . .

[AntonLee]

But a time-consuming lawsuit over eminent domain blocked the NLDC's other goals and now the Fort Trumbull project is mired in the national recession.

how dare those people not lay out the welcome mat as some douches come to take their homes, just to give them to some major drug company that couldn't afford to put a hotel there anyways.  Disgusting.

[Dan]

Susett gave a presentation on her story, her current resolve to fight this, and her book:

Cato podcast January 27, 2009: "A Story of Eminent Domain Abuse" featuring Susette Kelo

http://www.cato.org/dailypodcast/susettekelo_astoryofeminentdomainabuse_20090127.mp3

[error]

Or see the whole thing here.

[Kat Kanning]

Everybody loses, I guess.



INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE
HOME PAGE:  WWW.IJ.ORG

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
November 9, 2009


The End of an Eminent Domain Error:
Pfizer R&D Headquarters Closes in New London, Conn.

Land Taken in Infamous Kelo Supreme Court Case Remains Empty More Than Four Years After Ruling

Arlington, Va.—Pfizer, Inc., announced today that the company will be closing its former research and development headquarters in New London, Conn.  This was a project that involved massive corporate welfare and led to the abuse of eminent domain that ultimately bulldozed the home of Susette Kelo and her neighbors in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Kelo v. City of New London.

This was the same bogus development plan that five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court refused to question when the property owners of New London pleaded to have their homes spared from the wrecking ball.  Justices mentioned that there was a plan in place, and that so long as lawmakers who are looking to use eminent domain for someone's private gain had a plan, the courts would wash their hands.  Now, more than four years after the redevelopment scheme passed constitutional muster—allowing government to take land from one private owner only to hand that land over to another private party who happens to have more political influence—the plant that had been the magnet for the development is closing its doors and the very land where Susette Kelo's home once stood remains barren to all but feral cats, seagulls and weeds.

Scott Bullock, who argued the Kelo case for the Institute for Justice on behalf of the New London homeowners, said, "Today's announcement that Pfizer is closing its research facility in New London demonstrates the folly of government plans that involve massive corporate welfare and that abuse eminent domain for private development.  The majority opinion in Kelo v. New London described the Fort Trumbull project as a 'carefully considered' plan, but it has been an unmitigated disaster from start—and now—to finish."

Bullock continued, "Project supporters blame the economic downturn for this turn of events.  That is all the more reason why taxpayer dollars should not be put at risk in speculative and risky development schemes."

Despite the Court's Kelo ruling, much change for the good has occurred.

Dana Berliner, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice and co-counsel in the Kelo case, said, "In the face of the U.S. Supreme Court's Kelo ruling, 43 states have now reformed their laws to better protect property owners.  What's more, seven state high courts have stepped in post-Kelo to protect the rights of homeowners against eminent domain abuse.  The high courts of Hawaii, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Missouri, New Jersey and Rhode Island have all ruled in favor of property owners and against eminent domain for private gain.  None has made Kelo the rule under their own state constitutions."

The tragic saga of the Kelo case is detailed in Jeff Benedict's book Little Pink House:  A True Story of Defiance and Courage (Grand Central Publishing; 2009).  In it, Benedict shares with readers how Kelo took on the City of New London, a cast of politically powerful villains and, ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case that sparked a revolutionary change nationwide in eminent domain laws—except in Connecticut.

[Jim Johnson]

Who always wins in the end?  Lawyer/politicians, scum of the earth profiteers on peoples misery. 

[jzacker]

Who always wins in the end?  Lawyer/politicians, scum of the earth profiteers on peoples misery. 

Not true.  Thanks to Kelo, 46 states passed laws to curb and/or prevent eminent domain abuses. 

[KBCraig]

Who always wins in the end?  Lawyer/politicians, scum of the earth profiteers on peoples misery. 

Not true.  Thanks to Kelo, 46 states passed laws to curb and/or prevent eminent domain abuses.

Ostensibly, anyway. When you look at the details, not all those bills do what was claimed. I know the Texas bill didn't.

[Lloyd Danforth]

They were interviewing some New London business advocate whose name I didn't get about the job loses. He may have been part of NLDC but, there was no references to it.
The interviewer asked him if any businesses were looking at Ft Trumbull.  All he would say was businesses were showing an interest in New London.

[Pat K]

CT= Porc Manor anyone?

The Lauren Canario hostel?

[Ogre]

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-famous-kelo-house-property-is-now-a-vacant-lot-2009-11

[toowm]

Pfizer pulling out and reaction:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/a-turning-point-for-eminent-domain/