STATE FEDERAL EMINENT DOMAIN WAR STORY

This is a rather comical story.

I worked on many cases where we took property, for a federally funded project, usually for a state road. Shared costs.

This case was for  improvements to a federal road into and through downtown Lakeland, for which the state was doing the project.

 

With the luck of the draw, among the lawyers, I drew a downtown US Post Office site, slated by the state project design to be taken and used for the project.

 

In the pre suit stage of the case, it became clear that this site was the most highly long fought over environmentally petroleum contaminated football, EPA, DEP, Polk County, City of Lakeland (the County seat), I knew about. Decades before, it had been a gas station site..... 

 

It was the subject of both local, state, and federal, ongoing, environmental regulatory proceedings...clean up, monitoring, use preventative, cost responsibility disputes, liability, etc., etc.,  etc.

 

It seemed to my public transportation client that these proceedings would go on indefinitely and, if allowed to, would either lengthily delay, or even prevent, the taking of the site for the road project. Usually such a site is designed around, if possible, but that was not for me to reflect upon at that point.

 

They asked me to take the parcel in a summary proceeding on short notice, as usual. That is what I did. The United States, the parcel owner, neither appeared, nor filed any paper.

 

About a month or so later, I got a very polite letter from an Assistant US Attorney in Tampa, requesting me to kindly dismiss my suit in Lakeland, which had been improvidently filed, in that the United States is immune from suits of this kind by the states without its consent, which had not been given in this case....this of course was true.

 

The letter did not seek or ask me to provide the United States any other relief in the case than dismissal of the petition.

 

At that point, my client having already taken the property, the United States was asking in effect only to have its compensation portion of the case dismissed.

 

Whether they knew what they were doing as well, given the environmental background, or not, I did not inquire into, but eagerly complied with this very reasonable request.

 

I heard that my clients were still scratching their heads, years later, in the central office in Tallahassee, regarding this matter.


Just imagine this parcel being taken nowadays, with the new design build buzz word condemnor mentality, and the corresponding ravening hunger such a case would generate on the rabid property rights owner side of the bar.