Rally Backs Eminent-domain Protester

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it's incredibly conservative to have no property rights...

Rally Backs Eminent-domain Protester
The Day | October 3, 2005
By ETHAN ROUEN

New London â??The woman imprisoned for refusing to leave a city council meeting last month may have been the reason for a rally held in Fort Trumbull Sunday, but the focus of the event was the planned taking of seven area homes by the city through eminent domain.

About 25 people showed up on the corner of Walbach and Smith streets to show their support for Lauren Ann Canario, a Las Vegas resident and eminent domain opponent who has been in prison for more than two weeks after she was charged with first-degree trespass, refusal to be fingerprinted and interfering with police.

â??I think she said more than any of us could have said by not speaking,â?� said Doug Schwartz, the event organizer and head of the Coalition to Save the Fort Trumbull Neighborhood.

He was one of several speakers who touted Canario's bravery and berated the city for trying to snatch private property for commercial use.

The event began with Dan Gross, a New London resident who wrote a song titled â??Shame Shame Eminent Domain,â?� asking Fort Trumbull residents to step up to the microphone. None came to the microphone when asked, but two residents, including Richard Bryer, who owns 41-49 Goshen St., attended the event.

Gross and the New London Deliverance Combo, or NLDC for short, performed the song, and a man wearing a â??Death to NLDCâ?� name tag spray painted on the wall behind them, â??Free Lauren Now!â?�

Most of those with a personal stake in the eminent domain battle have met Canario's protest with indifference, but at the second rally for her in two weeks, people carried signs with her picture on it, and one speaker compared her actions to those of Gandhi.

â??Through your efforts, you have awakened the American people to the fact that they don't really own their property,â?� said state Rep. Steve Mikutel. â??If we lose our property rights, then our freedom is threatened, so we are all New Londoners today.â?�

pisshead Reviewed by pisshead on 10-04-2005. Rally Backs Eminent-domain Protester it's incredibly conservative to have no property rights... Rally Backs Eminent-domain Protester The Day | October 3, 2005 By ETHAN ROUEN New London â??The woman imprisoned for refusing to leave a city council meeting last month may have been the reason for a rally held in Fort Trumbull Sunday, but the focus of the event was the planned taking of seven area homes by the city through eminent domain. About 25 people showed up on the corner of Walbach and Smith streets to show their Rating: 5

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Fort Trumbull Protester Like A Tree In The Forest

The Day | October 1, 2005
By ETHAN ROUEN

New London â?? It has been 13 days since Lauren Ann Canario was sent to prison for refusing to leave City Hall following a canceled City Council meeting about eminent domain, but Canario's sacrifice has been hardly noticed by many close to the issue.

â??I don't think anyone's paying attention to it,â?� said Councilor Beth Sabilia.

That Canario does not have any ties to Fort Trumbull or New London makes it difficult to sympathize with her, Sabilia said.

Canario, 48, came to New London from Las Vegas with plans to help Fort Trumbull homeowners protect their houses from the city, which plans to take them by eminent domain. A former Army firefighter with a doctorate in art, she is a member of the Free State Project, a Libertarian group that wants to move 20,000 activists to New Hampshire. As part of her protest against eminent domain she was renting an apartment in one of the buildings slated for demolition.

She was arrested and charged Sept. 19 with first-degree trespass, refusal to be fingerprinted and interfering with police when she refused to leave City Hall. Since then, she has not spoken a word to officials, nor has she cooperated with an attorney.

Instead, she has sat silently at the Janet S. York Correctional Institution in Niantic. She will appear Tuesday in New London Superior Court.

On Sunday, Canario's supporters will hold a second rally for her in front of the East Street home of Susette Kelo, one of the property owners who lost their court case to keep their homes. Last week about 10 supporters rallied in front of York.

Members of the Coalition to Save Fort Trumbull will attend the rally, as will state Rep. Steve Mikutel, D-45th District.

â??I'm going there because I believe there is injustice in New London, and I want to be there to challenge it,â?� he said. â??I think this woman is standing up for the property rights of all the citizens of the state of Connecticut. I think she needs to be supported.â?�

Property owners in the Fort Trumbull area welcome any attention brought to their cause.

Matt Dery said he found Canario's sudden appearance in the neighborhood odd, but â??it's nice to know that people you don't even know are concerned with your welfare.â?�

Bill Von Winkle, from whom she rented a Fort Trumbull apartment, said he still believes Canario will make a national splash.

Canario's husband, Jim Johnson, had asked people to send teddy bears and toy guns to Von Winkle's house to show their support, but Von Winkle said none have arrived.

Still, he said, â??This girl is as serious as a heart attack, and the world's going to know it.â?�

Councilor Rob Pero, however, portrayed Canario as an opportunist who is more concerned with the issue of eminent domain than a city she arrived in only weeks before her arrest.

â??The will of the council, at least my will, will not be determined by a person who lives in Las Vegas,â?� he said. â??I think it's kind of a disgrace.â?�

As City Council elections approach and the discussion about eminent domain remains at the forefront, others have also treated Canario with indifference.

â??Who?â?� said New London Development Corp. President Michael Joplin when asked about Canario. â??She hasn't had any effect on NLDC. I didn't even know her name.â?�

Joplin said he suspects that Canario is involved with the Institute for Justice, a non-profit Libertarian law firm representing the homeowners, but a spokesman for the institute said it does not have a position on her because she is â??not directly related to the case.â?�

Amanda Phillips, the president of the Free State Project, also distanced the group from Canario, saying her imprisonment has nothing to do with the goals of the organization, which does not take a position on eminent domain.

Johnson, Canario's husband, said she has been abandoned by many who promised to support her. Canario had promised to bring 6,700 people to Fort Trumbull. http://www.theday.com/gbl/media/imag...o_endstory.gif

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When David meets Goliath

Newsday | May 8, 2005
BY JOHN RILEY

NEW LONDON, Conn. -- When it all started in 1997, Claire Gaudiani was the president of Connecticut College, a specialist in French literature and philanthropy who had become a flamboyant and fabulously successful fund-raiser at the pricey school on a hill overlooking this economically depressed old whaling port.

She saw it as her social obligation to spearhead an ambitious redevelopment plan - a Pfizer pharmaceutical headquarters anchoring a waterfront hotel, upscale new housing, and retail and office space - that would revitalize the city's tax base and give hope to those less fortunate.

"It was a very idealistic vision," said Gaudiani, now a lecturer at New York University, in a recent interview.

But Susette Kelo was in the way. She had just bought an inexpensive little pink Victorian with views of Long Island Sound and the Thames River in Fort Trumbull, the peninsular low-income neighborhood with a smelly sewage plant in its midst that was the target of Gaudiani's idealistic raze-and-rebuild vision.

Kelo was no college president, just a nurse, a daughter of two factory workers who had grown up in the neighborhood. And her vision was that she, her disabled husband and her kids would continue to live where they wanted to live.

"Nobody ever pushed my mom around," Kelo said. "Nobody ever pushed my grandmother around. It's a long line. I've never liked being told what to do."

Eight years later, in the shadow of a gleaming new Pfizer research facility, Kelo's pink Victorian and the houses of six neighbors are still standing with defiant "Not For Sale" signs in the windows amid the rubble of an otherwise demolished neighborhood. And the clash between one woman's stalled civic vision and another's property rights has become the focus of a U.S. Supreme Court case that could change the face of American land use law and alter development projects from Brooklynto California. The issue: The Constitution allows government to seize private property for "public use" as long as it pays "just compensation," a power called "eminent domain" that has traditionally been used to clear the way for such projects as public roads, prisons and reservoirs. But in New London and many other cities and states, the power also has been used to take property and flip it to private, for-profit parties - companies with jobs, or developers of projects for the affluent that will enhance the tax base and thereby assist the public goal of economic development.

Nine states currently prohibit such takings under their state laws. But in Connecticut, New York and elsewhere, the approach has been used prolifically. From 1998 to 2002, according to a Washington institute helping the New London homeowners, there were more than 3,700 takings of homes and small businesses nationwide for the benefit of parties ranging from auto dealers, raceways and condominium developers to The New York Times, Costco and Nissan Motor Co.

Not a public use

Until now, most lawyers thought the Supreme Court had assented to that extension of the condemnation power. But Kelo and her fellow holdouts have challenged it, arguing that taking their homes to help attract Pfizer and create an upgraded, privately developed, tax-rich neighborhood was not a "public use." And the court's decision to hear the case, with a ruling expected in June, indicates at least some justices may be interested in reining in the power.

"There is no limit on eminent domain if that is permitted," said Scott Bullock, of the Institute for Justice, the Washington public-interest law firm representing the Fort Trumbull holdouts. "Every business produces more tax revenue than your home. Every larger business produces more tax revenue than a smaller business."

Indeed, in Supreme Court arguments last month, lawyers for New London were unabashed in telling the court that, hypothetically, they believed a city could condemn a Motel 6 and give it to Ritz-Carlton to increase tax revenues. The city and a panoply of supporters - including New York State, New York City, and backers of developer Bruce Ratner's proposed basketball arena in Brooklyn - warned the court in briefs that if it restricts the power, cranky property owners would be able to stall projects such as the original World Trade Center, and the redevelopment of Times Square and Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

"It would be a serious realignment of the way city and county governments do their economic development," said Edward O'Connell, the lawyer for New London's development authority. "A city like New London would not be able to rejuvenate itself despite its best efforts."

New London's project was designed as a lifeline for a city that for decades had suffered from shrinking population, high unemployment and a declining school system, and lost another 1,400 jobs in 1996 when the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Fort Trumbull closed. Pfizer, which had run out of expansion space in Groton across the river, seemed like a golden opportunity.

The Pfizer Global Research headquarters, built on a city-owned site adjoining Fort Trumbull that was once the site of a linoleum plant, was opened in 2001, and has already boosted New London with 2,000 new jobs. But the hotel, upscale housing, offices and retail shops once imagined by the company and civic leaders remain a dream. The redevelopment authority controls more than 95 percent of Fort Trumbull's 90 acres and 100 of its 115 lots, but have accomplished little aside from demolition.

'Poster child' for effort

Gaudiani still defends her vision. "I understand the complaints, but I was looking at a city with no more developable land, no industry, and 75 percent of the kids on public assistance," she said. "It's a problem for me to keep raising millions of dollars for a swanky liberal arts college while doing nothing for all these low-income kids. There's a really deep moral issue here. Do you just say, 'Who cares if these kids get a break?' "

As residents fought to save their homes, one of Gaudiani's published comments - "Anything that's working in our great nation is working because somebody left skin on the sidewalk" - became a symbol of the alleged callousness of the effort. That, combined with a high-voltage personality and her marriage to a Pfizer executive, made her what she called "the poster child for the monster."

But three years after leaving New London, Gaudiani still makes the same point in different words. "There are circumstances in which the one gives to the many," she says. "E Pluribus Unum. We always want to protect the one. But the expectations for the one have to be looked at in terms of the many lives that will be helped."

A historic view

Kelo and her fellow holdouts in Fort Trumbull don't buy that logic. "They act like you should get out for the greater good of the community," said Bill von Winkle, who owns several rental properties that he bought with the profits from a lunch deli he ran for workers at the now-departed undersea warfare center. "I'm not sure why the homeowner has to do that."

They see the battle through the prism of class and history. Matt Dery, a circulation manager at New London's daily newspaper, said his family settled on their little corner lot in Fort Trumbull more than 100 years ago, when it was an enclave for new Italian immigrants. His parents, both in their 80s, live next door, and two adjoining properties are rented. They don't want money, he said, they just want to be left in peace.

Somehow, he said, government's grand civic visions always skip over the homes of millionaires, and target people of modest means as the ones who have to sacrifice for the many.

"They thought they could steamroll us because we're undereducated, lower-middle-class people," said Dery. "They looked at our view of the river and said, 'This isn't the highest and best use.' We're going to take it. . . . The only thing that protects anyone is being rich or politically well connected."

The history of the project provides at least some support for such bitterness. The smell from the sewage plant, for example, was long ignored by the city - until Pfizer came and insisted that it be fixed. The only structure in Fort Trumbull spared from condemnation was the squat, one-story Italian Dramatic Club, a hangout for local and state politicians.

And Kelo pointed to recently published remarks by lawyers for the city, acknowledging that they hope refurbished housing will attract young professionals from Pfizer to Fort Trumbull - people with "leadership qualities to remake the city."

Those comments, she said, reflect the social snobbery driving a plan that could more easily have been executed by renewing the neighborhood around the houses of those who didn't want to sell.

"They don't want us rubbing elbows with the bow-tie boys from Pfizer," she said. "It has been a class issue from the start - we're uneducated and poor, and it's OK to do that to the poor."

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[align=left]http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/bureaucratic_dirty_tricks.html[/align]
[align=left]Bureaucratic Dirty Tricks Bankrupting Homeowners[/align]
[align=left]By Mark Anderson[/align]

[align=left]The city of New London, Conn., is not happy with just taking citizensâ?? property. Now they are out for blood, say residents. Since the now infamous U.S. Supreme Court ruling on June 23 in the Kelo vs. New London eminent domain case, New London bureaucrats are trying to say that, while fighting for their private property, affected homeowners in the cityâ??s Fort Trumbull area were living on borrowed land and owe the government money.[/align]

In effect, New London is arguing that, even though the court had yet to decide, the homeownersâ?? land was â??city landâ?� for the duration of the lawsuit and that homeowners owe penalties and rent to the city. â??Itâ??s a new definition of chutzpah: Confiscate land and charge back rent for the years the owners fought confiscation,â?� is how The New Haven Advocate described the situation.

This city tactic is based on the assumption that those who legally resist handing over their homes to the government, even though they may still be paying property taxes like any other homeowner, are mere renters and must pay five years of back rent since the city first started condemning and bulldozing homes in October 2000.

This approach is viewed as raw retribution by the court caseâ??s namesake, Susette Kelo, and the other nearby homeowners who some have likened to that famous, nameless lone sole who stood up against Chinese tanks in 1989 during the communist governmentâ??s crackdown on a budding democracy movement.

The web site, cottagecoalition.org, tells the story of Kelo, Matt Dery and the other few, brave people who have held out against what many observers see as the cityâ??s shameless onslaught against property rights.

Beginning in 2000, the city announced its plan to attempt to revitalize the supposedly ailing Fort Trumbull area by replacing many homes, including those of Kelo, Dery and a few other holdouts, with a hotel, a conference center, offices and upscale housing that would complement the adjoining Pfizer pharmaceutical facility.

The city, citing eminent domain, condemned the homes, told the owners to move and began leveling surrounding houses. Dery owns four buildings on the project site, including his home and the birthplace and lifelong home of
his 87-year-old mother, Wilhelmina.

This back rentâ??unless the determined lawyers for the homeowners can prove otherwiseâ??could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Moreover, as The New Haven Advocate noted, the amount of money the city had offered to â??buy outâ?� these remaining Fort Trumbull homeowners is based on the market rate from the year 2000. Thus the â??back rentâ?� could easily be more than the homeowners might get in the buy out, completely nullifying the constitutional concept that those who surrender private property to the government should receive â??just compensation.â?�

What has really raised Americansâ?? hackles in this court ruling is that the government can now serve as an intermediary, wresting land from private landowners by exercising eminent domain powers and conveying it to other private interests instead of limiting such takings to clearly defined public uses like parks, highways and military bases.

â??I canâ??t replace what I have in this market for three times [the 2000 assessment],â?� Dery, 48, who works as a home delivery sales manager for The New London Day, told the Advocate.

He soothes himself with humor: â??Itâ??s a lot like what I like to do in the stock market: buy high and sell low.â?� Dery has been assessed $6,100 per month, which will total more than $300,000.

Another resident, William von Winkle, could owe the city $200,000 in back rent. And Kelo, who owns a modest, pink, single-family house with her husband, believes she would owe around $57,000.

She told AFP soon after the high courtâ??s 5-4 ruling that she could easily be forced from her beloved home brokeâ?? not only without a home but also without any money to get another one.

â??I could probably get a large-size refrigerator box and live under the bridge,â?� she told the Advocate.

[align=left](Issue #37, September 12, 2005)[/align]


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