Over the last few weeks, I’ve pulled together articles on the property rights amendment that will be debated a second time in the upcoming General Assembly session and the local government opposition to the measure. In each case, the reporters’ articles (all from Northern Virginia) I link to quote local officials as being deeply worried over the section of the amendment that would allow property owners to recoup damages for lost access and profits from takings. All of them use the same example: city or county sponsored street fairs and festivals and new infrastructure projects could unleash a storm of litigation.
Now we have the street festival/sewer line bogeyman appearing in Lynchburg, as duly recorded in this News & Advance piece. What reporter Alicia Petska does that her NoVa counterparts don’t, though, is make note of this universal concern:
Lynchburg and other local governments are anxious about the amendment, saying it’s too broad and will jack up the cost of infrastructure projects and public events such as street fairs and parades.
So we know the talking points have been distributed, read and parroted. But among the more nefarious of the talking points is the one repeated by Lynchburg city manager Kimball Payne:
“It’s just poorly constructed,” Payne said of the amendment. “… This takes nothing away from our strong respect for property rights. It’s a bad amendment.”
This is an out-and-out lie, as Del. Rob Bell told the Washington Times, as Bart Hinkle reminded us in his RTD column, and as Sen. Steve Newman says in the News & Advance:
Sen. Steven Newman, R-Lynchburg, said the city and its hired lobbyist have consistently opposed any effort to limit powers of eminent domain.
Local governments and a raft of others who depend upon eminent domain have fought stricter property rights measures consistently for years because such controls are a threat to the way they do business. That they are now reduced to warning of the possible litigation that might arise from street festivals shows how bare their rhetorical larder has become.
And just in case one gets the impression that local governments are the only bad actors in the property rights fight, the biggest bully of them all has consistently been the commonwealth of Virginia, through VDOT. More on that can be found here. And for one of the more jaw-dropping examples of VDOT’s abuse of property rights, check out this interview with Edd Jennings, a farmer in Southwest Virginia.
