You surf over 40 webpages each morning, and you are bound to miss something. I’ve always been annoyed that the Sacramento Bee carries one of their political columnists, Dan Walters, on their online politics page, but they ‘hide’ the other prominent political columnist, Dan Weintraub, over on their opinion page.
Well, today Weintraub has an excellent column that I totally missed. It will appear on the main page tomorrow, but it is definately worth a read. In it, he looks at whether the issue of reformining
the abuses of the emminent domain system here in California (this is where government can take property from a private citizen over their own objection) will becom the next Proposition 13, in terms of being a rallying issue for property owners all around the state. The column takes a particular look at the efforts of State Senator Tom McClintock at putting forward a ballot measure that may appear on the ballot next year (coincidentally when McClintock himself will appear, as a Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor).
Weintraub’s column begins:
Sacramento Bee
California conservatives are forever searching for the next Proposition 13, the property-tax-cutting initiative that tapped into a deep, bipartisan disgust with government in 1978 and ushered in an era of tax reductions and spending limits that ultimately helped pave the way for Ronald Reagan to win the presidency.
Have they found it in eminent domain? That long-standing policy, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and state laws, allows the government to force the sale of private property for public use as long as it pays the owner fair market value in return.
The definition of "public use," once limited to highways, parks and the like, has evolved over the years to something more akin to "public purpose." Lately, the chief use of the power has been on behalf of economic development, with governments buying land considered blighted and then selling it to another private party to transform into other, more productive uses.
Read the entire column here