Adopt Appropriate Limits on the Use of Eminent Domain
Across the country, numerous attempts to use public condemnation authority to facilitate redevelopment projects by private redevelopers have spawned controversy and litigation. The U. S. Supreme Court recently upheld this use of eminent domain authority in Kelso v. The City of New London case, and the political and legal ramifications of this decision will likely be felt for some time.

In New Jersey, state law has long authorized government agencies at several levels to condemn private lands for public purposes, and New Jersey courts have traditionally interpreted public purposes fairly broadly. Ironically, however, in recent years the Legislature has taken the power of eminent domain away from the Department of Environmental Protection as a means of acquiring additional open space, which sometimes thwarts the acquisition of key additions to state parks, forests and wildlife management areas, while local governments retain their full powers to acquire land by eminent domain. In fact, local governments are authorized under New Jersey’s redevelopment laws to declare blighted areas and then condemn private property in these areas for private redevelopers. In several recent redevelopment cases, local governments have been roundly criticized for abusing this extraordinary power. These instances raise the legitimate question of where to draw the line between the public purpose of redevelopment and the more private purpose of providing financial rewards to a private redeveloper, particularly where private redevelopers have made major campaign contributions to the same public officials who propose to use their public power of condemnation to clear the way for these lucrative redevelopments.

It is axiomatic in our society that the public good must sometimes outweigh the interests of one or more individuals, and it is unlikely that any number of clearly public projects (such as most major highways, airports, and many schools) would have been built without the occasional use of eminent domain. Accordingly, it is essential that government retain this authority in order to proceed with critical public projects, as well as other projects in the public interest, even if some of these projects are in fact implemented by private interests.

However, several pending redevelopment projects threaten to push the credibility of condemnation to a point where the public may not accept these takings as legitimate, regardless of the compensation paid for the affected private property. This is particularly true when local governments seek to boost tax ratables by allowing the condemnation of the homes and business of citizens at the lower end of the economic spectrum in order to promote more lucrative and upscale private redevelopment. Such actions pose serious questions of equity and equality, and can, in turn, create new problems for both these displaced families and society as a whole. Accordingly, while it is time for state government (which created local governments and their various instrumentalities) to restore the condemnation powers of DEP for public park purposes, the state government should also exercise additional oversight by enacting new safeguards to insure that condemnation authority is used by local agencies only when it is a genuinely legitimate and necessary exercise of one of the ultimate powers of government. State oversight, and perhaps even state approval, is particularly appropriate in order to assure the public that private interests cannot avail themselves of local government’s condemnation authority as obvious quid pro quos for campaign contributions.

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