Another Case of the Government Knows Best Gone Awry

Remember the Supreme Court Decision of “Kelo vs New London“?

Washington, D.C.— Today, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a blow to home and small business owners throughout the country by allowing the government to use eminent domain to take homes so that businesses can make more money off that land and possibly pay more taxes as a result.

New London Claimed that condemning the property was part of a larger scaled project called the Fort Trumble Project would serve the common good because the development project would bring lots of money to the community and into the city coffers. Things didn’t quite work out as claimed.

Meanwhile, in New London, the Fort Trumbull project has been a dismal failure.  After spending close to 80 million in taxpayer money, there has been no new construction whatsoever and the neighborhood is now a barren field.  In 2009, Pfizer, the lynchpin of the disastrous economic development plan,announced that it was leaving New London for good, just as its tax breaks are set to expire.

$80 Million later the weed infested lots have been put to use:

As regular readers of this blog know, the redevelopment project that gave rise to the wretched U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London, never came about. In spite of the city’s boasting about the quality of its plans, nothing was ever built on the Fort Trumbull site from which the city displaced an entire unoffending, well maintained lower middle-class neighborhood. Though the formal taking took place in 2000 and the U.S. Supreme Court gave its approval to it in 2005, the city’s project has been a failure, with 91 acres of waterfront property sitting there empty and overgrown by weeds.

Now, we learn from the local newspaper, The Day, that following the hurricane Irene, the city has designated the Fort Trumbull redevelopment site as a place to dump vegetation debris. For a video of locals dumping that stuff on the site, click here.

Closer to there was a similar case in Bayport, Texas with similar results. Where a hyphenated Judge screwed a landowner.  They invested millions of  taxpayer dollars into a never used cruise terminally  yet we continue to pay security and maintenance fees for a facility that will likely never be used.   At least Fort Trumble is serving some purpose today, The Cruise terminal just sits there.

About Liberty

Blogging is something I do for myself. I've been blogging since Sept. 2003, mostly about politics, guns, and observations about the word around me.
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