Today’s New York Times brings us a lachrymose tale about Half Moon Bay, a posh little town in Norhern California, that is facing a financial crisis. Jesse McKinley, In a Beachside Tourist Town,  A Wrenching Decision to Outsource, N.Y. Times, April 4, 2011, at p. A12. Quoth the Times: “Half Moon Bay is a world apart: a comfortable surf-and skate town” that  borders on the waters of San Francisco Bay. It boasts of  “sweeping ocean views,” to say nothing of a Ritz-Carlton hotel. In short, it’s pretty much the sort of place where God would live if He could only afford it. So what’s the problem?

The problem that attracted the New York Times’ attention is that Half Moon Bay, facing a $500,000 municipal deficit — welcome to California, folks — has had to disband its police department and  turn over its policing function to the local sheriff’s department. Why that happened is a bit difficult to fathom, given the enviable economic status of the town’s inhabitants. To say nothing of the fact that instead of meeting their financial obligations, only last fall the city’s voters turned down a sales tax measure that would have helped, thereby raising the justified suspicion that the assertedly impoverished status of  Half Moon Bay may be self-inflicted.

If you harbor such suspicions, go to the head of the class. That vote is a small part of the city’s problems, and it casts an illuminating light on what passes for municipal morality these days.  As the Times puts it, “Half Moon Bay had been struggling with the impact of an $18 million settlement from a lawsuit filed by a local developer over a parcel of land the city had apparently accidentally flooded. “Apparently?” “Accidentally?” What chutzpa.

You can find the gory details of that litigation in the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Yamagiwa v. Half Moon Bay, 523 F.Supp.2d 1036 (N.D.Cal. 20007). It’s a long and fact-intesive opinion, so if you are into inverse condemnation, you should sit down, take a stiff drink, and have a go at reading it in its entirety. Suffice it to say that what the city did, among other things, was to build a storm drain so that  the periphery of the subject property was raised, and since the city also “borrowed” some13,000 cubic yards of dirt from it, that transformed it into a shallow “bathtub” with no drainage. Indeed, the city also led its own drainage onto the land. When the owner tried to drain the lot, the city forbade it. To add insult to injury, the city also imposed a $962,987.76 assessment against the subject property, and expected it to be paid off even though the owner could not build anything there.

Nor is that all. When the predictable happened, when the “bathtub” filled up with rain and runoff water, the city had the chutzpa to claim that this was a natural wetland that could neither be drained nor built upon. The state courts agreed — hey, it’s California, man — so the owners tried to pusue their inverse condemnation claim, still in state court, as required by the Williamson County case. It was at this point that the city removed the case to federal court. Bad move. His Honor took a dim view of the city’s conduct which continued unabated. The case was pending in federal court for some two years, during which it heard testimony by 22 witnesses, including seven experts, and considered 300 exhibits. The bench trial took over a week. It was only then that the city tried to pull a fast one.

At the end of the trial, when the court asked for post-trial briefing, the city was suddenly born again and took the position that, actually, this case shouldn’t have been in federal court at all, and that it should be remanded back to state court where everybody would start all over again. But the case was originally filed in state court and it was the city that had it removed to federal court. Cconsequently, his Honor was not amused. And rightly so.

We could go on about this litigational gem for a while, but all good things must come to an end, and it all ended when the court entered a $36.8 million judgment for the property owner. The city threatened to appeal, but after cooler heads and new counsel gave it some thought, it decided that settlement would be a more prudent option. The plaintiff-developer, being a sensible chap, settled for half the judgment amount, or $18 million. Which as far as we can tell was more than merely reasonable because once liability was established, the city’s appraiser conceded that damages ran to $26.6  million, so that in the end the owner settled for some 67% of the city’s own estimate of damages.

So now, along comes the New York Times shedding crocodile tears over the plight of this arrogant, rich community that refuses to meet its legal responsibility either toward its own policing obligations, or for the harm it has inflicted on others. Poor babies.

Remember the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. New London, in which the court approved the taking and destruction of an unoffending lower middle-class neighborhood for redevelopment that never took place? Sure you do. You may also recall that the pillar on which the court’s decision rested was planning. The city, said the court, did such a swell job on planning the redevelopment of the Fort Trumbull area of New London that the court simply had to defer to it. In fact, that turned out to be a crock. The plan was worthless; the city’s chosen redeveloper could not even get financing (and that was before the real estate bubble burst in 2008).

The subject land, all 91 acres of it, is now an empty, weed-overgrown swath of land, of interest only to birds and feral cats. On that, the city and the State of Connecticut blew at least $80,000,000 — probably a lot more.

Now The Day, the local New London newspaper brings the news that the city is going to hold a charette, whatever that is, in which the local folks are invited by a team of city and Yale Urban Design Workshop planners to partake of coffeee and cookies, and discuss various possible dvelopment schemes for that land that was taken by eminent domain by the city in 2000, and has been sitting empty and unproductive for some five years (which, by an odd coincidence, is longer than it took to fight and win Word War II). We looked up the word charette in our dictionary, which proved to be a singularly unrewarding activity – good ol’ Webster’s (at least our copy) defines charette as charette. Period. Why not call it just a plain old New England style town meeting, has not been explained. Evidently if you are going to deal with one of the greatest municipal screw-ups in modern history, it sounds better if you use a French term.

The reason for our acerbic approach to this event is that, as noted above, New London’s planning, its supposed thoroughness and quality, formed the linchpin of the Supreme Court’s decision. The court deferred to the city because of all that quality planning that was supposed to do wonders for the community. Now, six years after the event, the city is going back to the drawing board and starting all over again, this time by basing its decision-making on what the untutored local folks have to say. What happened to all that fancy “planning”?  

So it all boils down to municipal babble — first it’s the city planners’ skill that’s supposed to carry the day, but now it’s whatever the local folks come up with. And by the way, if you want a sampling of the latter, go to the public comments to that The Day article. Those are pretty teed off folks who don’t think much of their municipal government, and rightly so. To get a sampling of those public comments. Go to  http://www.theday.com/article/20110401/NWS01/304019923/-1/NWS    It isn’t pretty.

Follow up. For a report on what happened at that charette, go to http://newlondon.patch.com/articles/charrette-at-fort-trumbull-discusses-ideas-for-redevelopment The folks were into everything from big-box stores and docking for cruise ships, to creating a historical maritime village. Etc., etc. Conspicuous by its absence in this report is the cost of these capers, the source of funding, and the availability of market demand for all that stuff.

It is one of the old, dreary leftist cliches that when imposed upon, peasants and workers of the world will arise, take up arms against their capitalist oppressors and make revolution. But in the real world of today the problem is that when peasants arise for economic reasons they prefer to take up arms against their government which is depriving them of — dare I say it? — yes, depriving them of their property. We noted some of these  past events on this blog, our favorite being the case of Yang, the Chinese peasant who constructed a home-made multiple-tube rocket launcher and fired away at the folks who came to confiscate his land.

Now, the latest such dispatch comes to us from Suijang County in Yunnan Province of China. It seems that the government seized land owned by local peasants but failed to pay them what they saw as adequate compensation. What ensued was what the New York Times, with the utmost delicacy, calls a “protest” by the affected peasants. Actually, the “protest” was not exactly what we would call a protest. It “lasted for five days and was dispersed by . . .  paramilitary police officers and armored vehicles.”  . . . “The protest, one of the largest in China in recent memory, erupted because of heated disputes between residents and the government over compensation for seized land, a common source of conflict in China.” Emphasis added. See Edward Wong, China: Police Break Up Rural Protest, N.Y. Times, April 1, 2011, at p. A6. The moral here seems to be that it’s a bad idea to mess with people’s turf, whether they are Chinese or not.

Similar confrontations have taken place in Mexico where, back in 2002, a major confrontation ensued when the government offered to pay 7 pesos per square meter of land (about 8 cents per square foot) for some 13,300 acres of land wanted for a new airport. We are in no position to express an opinion on land  values in Mexico, but even so, 8 cents per square foot does seem a bit skinflity. It turned out that the campesinos on the short end of that offer did not take it kindly so they took up arms and took hostages. See Richard Boudreaux ad Rafael Aguirre, Standoff Over Land Continues in Mexico, L.A. Times, July 13, 2002, at p. A5.

Our favorite confrontation of this kind took place in Fiji. There, after a lengthy delay in payment, former owners of land that had been taken for a reservoir showed up en masse at the government building, stripped to the waist, carrying spears and demanding their compensation then and there. If you have not been to Fiji, be advised that native Fijians tend to be rather large, and not to be messed with. So the local government types called in the army, which proved to be a mistake. As the story was told to your faithful servant, after assessing the situation, the Army types responded by expressing their disinclination to inflict violence on their friends, and instead of taking up arms, took up generous quantities of kava, a local medicinal tincture reputed to engender good feelings among its consumers. So instead of expelling the spear-carrying protesters, the Army folks joined them in a few cups of the aforementioned potion, which resulted in  much good feelings but no attempt to expel the protesters. On reflection, the governmemnt types saw the light, and the money that was due to the displaced property owners was promptly found and duly disbursed.

And of course, there is the granddady of them all. In the 1950s, the Japanese decided to build the Narita Airport near Tokyo and instead of taking the customary long time to persuade the targeted land owners to sell their land voluntarily, the Japanese government expropriated it. Oh, boy! Bad idea. Suffice it to say that during the ensuing half century there have been recurring riots by the former farm owners, and after their death, by their progeny. While on a trip to Japan, your faithfuil servant was puzzled by the heavy presence at the airport by the Japanese National Police — a heavily armed paramilitary force, equipped with heavy automatic weapons and armored vehicles, which they deemed prudent to have on hand for such contingecies.

And if you think that it’s only in far off, exotic places that such goings on go on, be advised that we had some violent confrontations between the state police and farmers whose land was being taken for high-voltage power lines in — ta, da! – Minnesota. Yes, Minnesota. Those sturdy Scandinavian types may be renowned for being law-abiding and peaceful, but not when you mess with their property.

So the moral here would seem to be that no matter how civilized your society, messing with people’s property without damn good reason, without affording them fair compensation, determined in an impartial way, and without treating them with elemental dignity is to look for trouble.

Follow up. An eagle-eyed reader of this blog reminds us of another violent confrontation in Japan, also concerning the taking of land for an airport. See David Holley, An Unlikely Field of Battle, L. A. Times, May 31, 1998, describing Japanese protesters of airport expansion into their farm land, who attacked police with rocks and Molotov cocktails and beat three officers to death. Those folks don’t fool around when you mess with their land.

Also see Jarrett Noble, Land Seizures in The People’s Republic of China: Protecting Property While Encouraging Economic Development, 22 Pac. McGeorge Global Bus. & Dev. L. Jour. 355-356, notes 1 and 2 (2010), citing reports of other violent confrontations in China, between owners of “grabbed” land and its [former] owners.