My Front Yards Being Taken By Eminent Domain

So for anyone who doesn't know what eminent domain is, it's when the government seizes private land for a project that benefits the public good. An example of this is they want to make a new highway or roadway and it will benefit the entire community and the residents so they will take private land in the path of the new roadway in order to make the roadway.

While this does suck for the person it's happening too, I realize it's a necessity in some cases. If everyone was able to hold out and refuse to sell roadways woudln't be built, power lines couldn't be run, etc. I think the bigger issue is fairly compensating people for their land and not just stealing it and saying here's what we'll give you. Which by the way is typically an amount which is unfair to the land owner.

More troubling however is in recent years this eminent domain has been used to steal people's land not for public or government use but for private use. You have a house near the beach you've lived there for 50 years. The area has been developed and now a new hotel wants your land. They work with the government to seize your land for private use, and the government uses the excuse it will be good for tax payers in that a hotel will pay more taxes than you would pay in just property taxes, that's not what it was designed for.

All that said I think the biggest issue is how unfairly the land is valued and how landowners are cheated. A couple years back in my area they wanted to build a new school. In order to do so they wanted to take a farmers land. They started the proceedings and told him they would give him $3,000 per acre, his land by the way was worth much more than that.

Now had this farmer not had money to fight it, they would have taken his land and given him peanuts and that would have been the end of it. Fortunately he had money to fight and through some sort of appeal the courts said yes the government can take his land, but fair market value is $33,000 per acre. The school obviously backed off and found a new property as they wanted his property if they could steal it for way under market value, however once they had to pay a fair amount they no longer wanted it.

This Is My Story

So a few weeks back I get a letter in the mail from the city/county/Comed saying that these huge trees in my front yard have the Asian Bettle and need to be removed. They will do it free of charge. Having trees removed can be very expensive so while I hated to see them go, it seemed like a good deal to me and I signed the papers and agreed. I had just moved in recently and it was winter time so I didn't really know if the trees were healthy or not or dead.

Fast forward a couple weeks I'm working in my front yard one day and a neighbor across the street who I hadn't met comes over and asks me "do you think it's fair what they're doing".

Me, assuming she's talking about the trees goes on rambling for a few minutes about how I hate to see my trees go, but if they have the beetle I guess it's good they are removing them for free. After a few minutes of her looking at me like I was crazy, I realize we're not talking about the same thing.

She explains to me she got a packet in the mail with an offer to buy her land in her front yard to make a roadway improvement. The offer for taking a fairly large slice out of her front yard was a measley $300. She showed me all the papers with the project and showed me that my new house I had just bought a few months earlier was also going to be affected.

It now occurs to me my trees may not have the asian beetle, these trees are in the pathway of the new road so I think they are just trying to get a headstart on clearing my land for the road project. I should mention fast forward a few months to now and these trees are in full bloom and look pretty healthy to me.

That day, a Sunday, I called the lawyer in charge of negotiating on the city's behalf and left him a pretty nasty message saying he's in for a fight if he thinks he's going to take my land period, let alone give me peanuts for it.

I wind up getting a call back from him, he says he's sending out a packet with my offer. A week or two later I get a packet in the mail. They are offering me $3700. I spoke to the lawyer and a guy at the county and asked if they would be compensating me for the fence they would have to knock down as well as the trees they were going to take out. I was told of course, we wouldn't give you a payout for your land and then tell you to use that money to fix our mess.

However after getting the contract $3700 is the all in amount. That includes damage to my fence, my trees, and my lawn, I will get nothing else. So in reality, after cleaning up the mess they make my $3700 I'm paid for a few hundred feet of my property there may be about $1,000 left over.

Here's the other part that rubs me the wrong way. In addition to permanently taking my land and making a road. In the interum during construction they want to take more of my land to use as a temporary easement and sidewalk for 5 years. For renting a large part of my front yard for 5 years they want to give me $500 which boils down to $100 per year. Just to give some context, I rent a small mailbox for my business very similar to the one below. I pay $200 per year for that box which is smaller than a loaf of bread and which doesn't disrupt anyone's life, however the city wants to pay me $100 per year for a couple hundred square feet and for tearing up my yard and having equipment all over my yard where I normally walk my dogs and play in the yard with my dogs.

I'm definitely getting screwed. They valued the land as vacant land in order to pay less. They valued my home $50,000 under market value. They state the project and taking my yard will only affect my home value to the tune of $2,000, a figure I disagree with. And they also are giving me nothing for proximity damages. Proximity damages being how your home value is affected by having the road closer to your house. Essentially I'm getting screwed pretty hard.

So technically speaking the process hasn't moved to "eminent domain" yet. Technically speaking they are negotiating with me, however negotiation essentially means here's a low offer, you can take it or you can fight it in court which will cost you attourney fees, hiring an appraiser and also paying said appraiser to testify and in the end the government will get their way anyhow.

While I'm not happy about this happening, I would at the very least like to be fairly compensated for this land grab and that's what really rubs me wrong about eminent domain as a whole. Land owners are not fairly compensated. Millions and millions of Dollars are given to these projects, I'm sure someone at the city or county kicks a no bid road contract to their brother in law and everyone eats well off the public money, and after all that they want to cheap out on a few thousand Dollars to justly compensate land owners like myself and others.

The situation gets a little shitter. So the other day I meet with the attourney and after a heated discussion I'm finally able to squeeze an extra $500 out of him and he tells me he'll send over new paperwork. I live in the not so great state of Illinois, you know the state that can't pay bills, the state that is losing Powerball and Mega Millions and the lotteries as we can't make the payments. The state where road construction is currently being halted because there's no money. So now I"m concerned if I'll even wind up being paid the measly couple thousand Dollars I was offered or if the check will bounce or the government will file bankrupcy and not have to pay me.

My point is this, eminent domain is shitty, but at least pay land owners a fair price. On projects that run into the millions the area to skimp is not in the area of fairly compensating someone for stealing their land, that's peanuts.