Check out this story from today's Greensboro/Winston-Salem (NC) News-Record, "DOT's long road to nowhere angers property owners" about the practice in North Carolina of using "protected corridors" to designate property under the state's Transportation Corridor Official Map Act for future highway use, but then not condemning and paying for the land (while preventing the owners from making any use of it).
We posted about the NC Supreme Court's decision in one of those cases, where the court concluded that the property owners could not litigate it as a class action, but must do so in individual cases (800 of them!). Another post on the Map Act cases here ("Lines On A Map" Or Inverse Condemnation: How Long Can A Taking Be Only 'Planned' But Not Executed?").
The News-Record story is a good read, and a quick summary; recommended reading. It doesn't hurt that the reporter asked for our input:
In essence, legal experts said, the DOT’s regulations make North Carolina one of the only states in the nation that can restrict a property owner without buying his land.“You can’t make people do nothing with their land — it’s straight up textbook 5th Amendment property law,” said Robert Thomas, a lawyer based in Hawaii who specializes in such cases and is paying close attention to the cases in North Carolina. “The Supreme Court said literally 100 years ago if you regulate property it’s the functional equivalent of buying it.”
Municipalities in North Carolina are normally limited to 60 days before they must issue building permits. The three-year delay in a protected corridor is highly unusual, Thomas said.
“You can’t require people to leave their land fallow while you think about someday maybe getting enough money to build your bypass,” he said.
These cases will be watched by the legal community, he said.
“You’re under the looking glass in North Carolina,” Thomas said.
A senior legal scholar was more blunt: “The government cannot depress the value of properties and then acquire them at a depressed value.”
Gideon Kanner, a professor emeritus of law at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has practiced law in such issues for 40 years, said most states have statutes somewhere that may allow for such actions, but “in most cases departments of transportation are too smart to try to pull it off.”
A property owner who is denied the ability to use that property is, plain and simple, denied his constitutional rights, Kanner said.
“The right to use determines whether you own property” Kanner said. Mocking the state’s legal attitude, he said: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, your title is in order, you own the property but, by the way, you can’t use it.”
Check out the whole report here.
