New jobs might hinge on eminent domain
Monday, December 06, 2004
Debbie Gebolys and Jodi Andes
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH


TOM DODGE | DISPATCH


Corvas Brinkerhoff, 21, a Milo Arts Center resident, paints while, from left, Ben Fox-McCord, Josh Devaney and Dave Lewis relax. Brinkerhoff’s windows overlook the Timken development site.


Rick Mann, owner of the Milo Arts Center and head of the area commission, plans to fight a developer’s plan for the Milo-Grogan area.


Developer Jerome Solove plans to ask the city to wipe out 200 modest homes in Milo-Grogan to make room for a bustling shopping center on an idled industrial site along I-71.

Neighbors are split on the plan, which a city official has called controversial because it involves taking the land by eminent domain.

Solove bought the former Timken Co. manufacturing plant on 31 acres at E. 5 th and Cleveland avenues this fall. Since then, he’s asked the city to declare the neighborhood just east of the site, between Cleveland Avenue and I-71, blighted.



The city then could take the land by eminent domain and name him master developer there.

The idea is controversial, Columbus Development Director Mark Barbash said.

"Nobody wants to do eminent domain," Barbash said. "Columbus is such a conservative community that to start a project with eminent domain is the wrong place to start.

"The first thing you talk about is what’s best for the neighborhood," he said.

Solove would like to make it an urban shopping destination with a "big grocery store, card shop, bakery, mar- ket with fresh fruits and vegetables, hardware, pharmacy, barber/beauty shop, general merchandise, specialty retail, retail banking, pizza, dollar store, hotel, medical/urgent care, laundromat," said a draft proposal given to the city.

But it would displace a community of people who are predominantly elderly or on fixed incomes. It includes 10 to 20 homes built by the Greater Columbus Habitat for Humanity.

Solove said he began meeting with Timken neighbors a year ago. He wants to understand community interests before he announces any specific plans for the site. But he has a general idea of what he wants.

"Retail is the solution," he said. "The opportunity for job creation in that location is very extensive."

For some, Solove is a godsend, offering what they see as the first real hope to bring jobs and services to the area. Milo-Grogan, some say, has been on the decline since the 1960s when I-71 cut it in two.

"It’s crime-ridden. It’s an area that’s been left out, no question about that," said Leroy Johnson, a member of the Milo-Grogan Area Commission who has lived in the area since 1954.

Johnson doesn’t fear demolishing homes since many are abandoned. And, he notes, the plan isn’t final.

Johnson said Solove is proposing services the area has long needed: "The closest post office is at High and 4 th. We had a lot of elderly; we need one closer."

But just the mention of eminent domain angers others.

‘’You’re talking about destroying a historic community. . . . This plan isn’t going to work," said Matt Vaccaro, also an area commissioner and a resident.

Vaccaro is not ready to move. He raised his older son and daughter in a home on St. Clair Avenue for 11 years and wants to raise his younger children there.

The draft talks of "demolition and construction of retail buildings" and "relocating residents from the west side of I-71" to the "east side of 71," but it does not spell out homes being razed, Vaccaro said.

To make sure residents understand the details, Rick Mann is assembling groups to go door to door to explain the fine print.

Mann and his wife spent thousands in legal fees fighting the city when officials tried to evict them in 2000. They own the Milo Arts Center, a former elementary school, where artists work and live.

Now head of the Milo-Grogan Area Commission, Mann and his wife vow to fight again.

But real-estate researcher Ken Danter said Timken is a natural for retail redevelopment.

"With the proximity to the central city, just look at the sheer mass of population. With those attributes, you can’t not look at a site like that," he said.

"To bring that site out to I-71 would be a huge attribute," he added.

What the city can and can’t do could be spelled out next year.

Battles over eminent domain for development are ongoing in Cincinnati and outside Cleveland. In September, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to look at when local governments can take homes and businesses for new projects.

For now, Solove said, he wants to follow Barbash’s advice and wait until city planners develop a Milo-Grogan plan.

Although he hasn’t formally requested city assistance yet, Solove established a redevelopment corporation for the Timken site "to best coordinate public involvement," he said.

Milo-Grogan isn’t scheduled for a community plan, and won’t be unless community members ask for one, Barbash said. Thus far, they haven’t.

The earliest a plan could be completed would be late 2005, Barbash said, and only after that would the city entertain requests from Solove for tax abatements or other incentives.

Still, the city enthusiastically supports redeveloping the site. The Timken factory once employed 5,400 to make railroadcar wheel bearings. It had 220 workers when it closed in 2001.

"The last thing I want to do," Barbash said, "is get down on a redevelopment opportunity."

the Morse Road Connector will one day be a reality.

DEBATE OVER EMINENT DOMAIN
Residents, developers clash throughout state
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Debbie Gebolys
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Although Columbus officials say eminent domain is a bad idea for the former Timken Co. site in the Milo-Grogan neighborhood, a growing number of cases nationally are pitting redevelopment riches against embattled homeowners.
Developer Jerome Solove asked Columbus to condemn about 200 homes and businesses between I-71 and Cleveland Avenue near the site to make way for a shopping center. The neighborhood lies between 2 nd and 5 th avenues, and many who live there are elderly or on fixed incomes.
If Solove’s redevelopment plans are deemed for the public good and city officials declare the area blighted, property owners would be forced to sell to the city. Solove could destroy the properties to make way for businesses that would generate more taxes for the city and create up to 1,000 jobs.
Although Columbus Development Director Mark Barbash opposes the idea of forcing homeowners to sell, the city has used eminent domain to force the sale of commercial properties for high-profile projects, including Nationwide Arena and Columbus City Center.
When asked at last night’s City Council meeting about using eminent domain, Mayor Michael B. Coleman said, "It’s a last resort. I think the (Milo-Grogan) site needs to be developed commercially . . . but eminent domain is a whole other story."
Coleman said he’d like to find another way to see the area gain retail stores.
Nationally, experts say eminent domain proposals increasingly include homes, including a Connecticut case that is to be heard early next year by the U.S. Supreme Court. Another simmers in a Cincinnati suburb, while people in a Cleveland suburb needed an election to save their homes.
In fact, Ohio has become a hotbed for eminent domain cases, according to the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm based in Washington that takes on governments. Between 1998 and 2002, the institute counted 421 cases where governments condemned or attempted to condemn properties for developers.
"It is clearly a state that is rampant in eminent domain abuse," institute attorney Scott Bullock said. "The good news in Ohio is that people are beginning to fight back."
In the Cincinnati suburb of Norwood, for instance, homeowners want to stop a developer from turning their neighborhood into a shopping-center parking lot. A Hamilton County Common Pleas judge ordered one couple to sell their $280,000 home. Although the home isn’t blighted, the judge said, it is "deteriorating."
Bullock’s firm is representing the couple and their neighbors in an appeal.
In Lakewood, outside Cleveland, city leaders several years ago condemned a middle-class neighborhood, deeming houses there blighted because they lacked two full bathrooms and air conditioning. Voters later removed the blighted status by referendum and defeated the mayor who proposed to fatten city coffers with a condo and shopping development.
Capital University law professor Susan Looper-Friedman said the Ohio cases and others are "a logical extension of the direction the Supreme Court has taken."
Since 1954, she said, the court has been interpreting the Fifth Amendment more broadly. Eminent domain once was used solely for schools, fire stations and other public areas. The Ohio Department of Transportation has used it to take land for construction of the central Ohio interstate system. More recently, courts have allowed governments to take properties for private developers who could enrich the cities and provide jobs.
"They’re pushing that envelope now," Looper-Friedman said, as courts relax the requirement that properties be declared blighted for them to be subject to eminent domain.
"If making money is significant justification, I think we’re all in trouble," she said. "This kind of thing really has the potential of hitting everybody, whether they own a home or rent it."
In Columbus, eminent domain has more commonly been used on commercial properties. When land for City Center was assembled in the 1980s, eminent domain was used to force owners of several office and retail buildings to sell. When Nationwide Arena was built in 2001, Nationwide Realty Investors and The Dispatch Printing Company were able to get several former parking lots and a bar through eminent domain.
Campus Partners used eminent domain to get apartment buildings that stood in the way of the Gateway development now under construction. And in 2000, the city forced the sale of a former bank on N. High St. in Clintonville to expand a fire station there.
Bill Habig, executive director of the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, said that using eminent domain for private development isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
"I don’t think I’d say it’s dangerous per se," he said. "It depends on the intent of the developer, the financial condition of the city and the consensus of the community."
So-called first suburbs such as Whitehall, Grandview Heights and Bexley face declining tax bases and a near-impossible task of assembling enough land to accommodate meaningful redevelopment projects, Habig said.
If the Supreme Court allows the Connecticut land-taking to proceed, local suburbs might begin eminent domain proceedings of their own.
"Land assembly would be a huge benefit to redevelopment," Habig said

F it, let's tool on the guy's picture:

Ladies & Gentlepersons.... I give you:

Jerome Solove


Ironically found on the Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel website, he is the CHAIRMAN of the Residential Utility Advocacy