A Fine Example of Government Promoting the Public Good
Yeah, well, maybe not so much. This one pretty much leaves me speechless.
Privately-Owned Parking Lot Seized By City So it Can be Used for . . . A Parking Lot
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Legal
Gee, and I thought all the jackasses in city politics were in Chicago. My mistake.
The city of Spokane (?) isn’t getting the revenues from the lot. They want not only the taxes she pays, they also want the money she makes from it. Greed knows no bounds.
“Ve are taking your property and yoosink it for ze common good!”
In Government, jackassery and asshatery know no bounds.
that state has been going downhill ever since the Height Ashbury nimrods moved up there.
There are very good reasons for exercising eminent domain but this isn’t one of them. And the fact that those who voted to take this lady’s land would not be interviewed after their vote is quite telling. They acted in the name of the public but they are unwilling to explain and defend their vote publicly? Yeah, I get it. Farking bastages.
What’s ridiculous is that there should have been any number of ways to make this work with the private citizen that didn’t require blunt force trauma to get it done….
When people can cooperate good things can happen, we had a small piece of private and city property abutting the Air Guard Field in Westfield Mass (Barnes Airfield) it was flat and could make a decent sports field if leveled and cleared. There was an airport authority, city government, and military component to this and guess what all the grown-ups acted like grown ups and 350 kids every fall and spring use that new sports field and parking lot that was built with grants and donated time from a variety of community businesses…no one was threatened, there was no takeover of property just a group of officials and community volunteers getting a good deed done…to this day the military security personnel make the rounds near the ball field and toss all the lost balls back over to the kids…it’s a pretty great thing when you see it function.
It doesn’t need to be like Hondo’s example in this article where everybody works to screw some poor taxpayer…
Used to work about 2 blocks from that lot. The city is tearing down the viaduct next to it and boring a tunnel for the traffic to go through, looks like the city wants to get the property and make a big profit on it. They are denying it but there are plans for a 5 story structure with businesses and parking levels.
Our ancestors would be shooting by now.
Well, thanks to SCOTUS and the Kelo ruling, cities seem to feel they can grab just about anything. Fortunately, some states saw what was coming and passed laws prohibiting such grabs. Guess Washington wasn’t one of them.
CC Senior: unfortunately, according to the SCOTUS under Federal law there are precious few limits on eminent domain if a city or state government is unscrupulous and is willing to pay a “fair price” for the item seized (the quotes are intentional). IMO that’s one decision where the SCOTUS royally fornicated Fido.
@7. They were shooting by now!
Hey Sparky. Would you mind terribly doing my part, too, hereafter.
Ah-ha, greed strikes again!
Eminent domain laws are written to mean whatever the local government wants them to mean.
They were used locally to annex the people in the valley into the city limits, and also used to make them go on the city sewer and water systems.
This is the same state where, while I was there 2004-2008, the State legislature was using “Emergency Powers” to pass any and every bill they wanted to so citizens couldn’t stand up in front of them and debate bills prior to passage.
Washington state is really wacky, on some things they are great and on other things they are douchebags.
#9 Hondo –
While it’s possible to agree that local government can abuse the power of eminent domain, there’s actually not much evidence that’s what’s going on in this particular instance.
In the first place, Ms. Woldson bought the property 19 years ago for $2.75 million, and has a third-party vendor run the parking operation for her. So it’s not as if she’s being forced out of her ancestral home, and being put on the street with her cats. It would also not be a surprise if Woldson bought the property knowing that the Alaskan Way Viaduct would eventually be torn down, and that her parking lot would fall in the redevelopment zone.
Secondly, Woldson has not refused to sell the property at any price; what’s actually going on is that her attorneys are currently in disagreement with the City of Seattle over what should be considered fair market value. And it’s real hard to tell who might be being greedy without knowing the details of those negotiations– which are confidential.
If memory serves, Washington State has open meeting laws similar to the Brown Act in California, which makes almost everything on the record with a few exceptions including some employee issues, lawsuits, and the kind of negotiation Woldson is currently involved in. The rationale for this, for better of worse, is that the confidentiality can act as a safeguard so that the private business affairs of people like Woldson don’t routinely become a matter of public record. Something that might change if the matter eventually bounces into civil court because the two sides can’t agree on a price.
What’s really giving this story legs is the fact that Woldson is 103-years-old, and Granny Fights City Hall always makes for a good yarn. That the city council has been required to keep the property negotiations secret has also had the effect of throwing raw meat into the journalistic shark tank.
@14
You think she knew 19 years in advance? Is she clairvoyant, or just a shrewd business woman? She took the risk of investment, she should get the rewards of guessing right.
Perry Gaskill: the facts of the matter argue otherwise. Per news accounts, the city is seizing the property in order to use it for the exact same eventual purpose as it’s being used for now. The only difference is the ownership.
This is not seizure of private property so it can be used for the “public good”. Here, there will no change in function (beyond perhaps a temporary use change or closure during the viaduct’s demolition), which would likely be required regardless of who owns the property due to safety considerations) . The property provides the same service to the public (parking) in private hands, as is demonstrated by the fact that it’s doing precisely that today. Therefore, this appears to be seizure of private property simply because the city wants it – not in order to promote any legitimate public purpose.
This is an abject abuse of power. It should NOT be permitted and should NOT be lawful. Sadly, due to a SCOTUS decision a few years ago it is.
#15 OldSoldier54 and #16 Hondo – OldSoldier54, People in Seattle have been talking about tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct for at least 30 years, and you’re right. If Ms. Woldson, evidently no dummy, is a businesswoman shrewd enough to have invested in the property, then indeed she should get the benefit if the value of the property appreciates. The problem is: how much? Woldson bought the property 19 years ago for $2.75 million. According to her parking lot manager, she once turned down an offer for $20 million. The City of Seattle, on the other hand, had an outside consultant estimate the value at around $13 million. Who’s right? Where do you draw the line between a reasonable profit, and a windfall because a city has deep pockets and somebody has it over a barrel? Hondo, “Per news accounts, the city is seizing the property in order to use it for the exact same eventual purpose as it’s being used for now.” Not exactly. The immediate problem the City of Seattle is trying to solve is that tearing down the viaduct will disrupt short-term on-street parking in the near term. Longer term, evidently according to plans favored by the state DOT, is for the property to be developed as a mixed-use multi-level parking structure. Essentially providing more parking with the same footprint. Something Woldson, assuming she lived that long, might have no inclination to do. Why the city would choose to condemn Woldson’s property now, instead of, say, waiting until after the viaduct is gone, is an interesting question. A rough guess might be the thinking that somehow leaving things unresolved until later will only make things worse. At the risk of veering off topic, I can understand the inclination of land owners to want to do anything with the property they own, but the reality is that political forces will not always allow that to happen. It’s the reason you don’t find junk yards next to schools, or topless bars next to churches. To some extent, at least it seems to me, eminent domain can be looked at… Read more »
I have a problem with casually tossing the rights of property owners away… If she didn’t want to develop a mixed use structure on that property – why would we take it away from her b/c we disagree with her?? And you want to condemn her because she wants fair market value for her property??
Either you own a piece of property or you don’t. If you do, then something like this should not be able to happen.
Only in the Soviet Socialistic Republic of Seattle. I migrated from the left side of Washington to the right side eleven years ago and these people are still providing me with the evidence that I made the right decision.
Perry Gaskill: the main problem I have with this is the abuse of the authority to define what constitutes the “public good”. IMO, this is a manifestly clear case of the abuse of that authority. What’s to prevent a city for using the same authority for aesthetic reasons – e.g., because they don’t like someone’s “pink house” and they refuse to paint it a different color?
Condemning a strip of property currently used as agricultural land to build a new road, or a parcel to build a new public hospital, at least arguably serves the public good. However, I simply don’t see how providing more parking so that the residents won’t be “inconvenienced” during a major construction project (that the city has known about for literally decades and for which the city has obviously failed to adequately plan) is sufficiently in the public interest to trump the rights of ANY property owner.
The SCOTUS has, unfortunately, ruled that bullsh!t such as this is lawful, doing so in Berman v. Parker (1954) and reinforced this in various other cases. The most recent is Kelo v. London (2005).
I can accept – grudgingly – government forcibly seizing private property through condemnation procedures to serve a legitimate public good. But seizing a parcel of property currently used as a parking lot so that someone else can eventually build a multistory parking garage on the same location? Um, no. That doesn’t pass the “smell test”. IMO that’s a complete crock, and it stinks to high heaven.