City of Kingston mayor Steve Noble’s decision to exercise the power of eminent domain to wrest back a privately-owned grassy field in the Rondout neighborhood has mobilized resistance. A consortium of corporations has filed a petition in appellate court to resist the city’s plan to buy the land from underneath them. Bypassing county supreme courts, eminent-domain cases are heard directly by appellate courts.
To thwart the mayor’s plans papers have been filed by Daniel Hubbel of the law firm Whiteman, Osterman and Hanna alleging the city has been going about the eminent-domain process all wrong.
Rather than hanging its case on one damning action, Hubbel accuses the city of three failings – failure to comply with the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), failure to provide a copy of an official record from a public hearing, and failure to provide sufficient evidence that the land was being taken for purposes beneficial to the public.
Petitioners have identified themselves as Hudson Land Development Corp, Rondout Landing at the Strand Inc., Gallo Realty Inc., and JAF Partners Inc. Kingston’s top counsel, Barbara Graves-Poller, suggested in a June 26 brief filed last week that those alleged owners of the parcels are representing themselves inaccurately. She alleged the petition was “commenced by three dissolved corporations and one active entity with a dubious interest in the subject parcels.”
“It is likely,” Graves-Poller said, “that no named petitioner has both standing and capacity to pursue these claims.”
On those grounds alone, Graves-Poller suggested that the court dismiss the petition brought before them outright. She went on to rebut each complaint.
The city has provided a number of reasons it wants the 3.5 acres of land between Route 9W and Broadway.
From a construction and planning standpoint, the acreage just off Garraghan Drive provides a convenient footprint for development. Whoever the owners are, they have preserved the build-ready land in its vacant but subdivided state since its purchase 36 years ago.
Mayor Noble has noted the convenient location near the shops and stores of the Rondout Creek waterfront and marina. Future tenants couldn’t help but boost the economy on The Strand.
The proximity to the police station would soothe the worry of future tenants during the annual Hooley parade.
But out of many reasons offered by the city, none has loomed as large in a conversation which has played out publicly as the opportunity the development could provide to address an historically damaging misstep. In the late 1960s as many as 361 families and 104 individuals living in the buildings standing over the grassy field were forced to “move on down the road.” Over 90 businesses went with them.
The local government of mayor Raymond Garraghan had been enticed by the promise of federal largesse from Urban Renewal, part of president Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative, to demolish what was standing in favor of what could be built to replace it.
“Hundreds of Kingston families lost their homes to an unkept Urban Renewal promise,” Graves-Poller wrote in her brief. “The city now intends to right that wrong, boost tax revenue, create jobs, and increase available housing using those long-vacant parcels.”
In a case which pits municipal meddling against the private prerogatives of landowners, the appellate court will have to tease apart interwoven issues to offer a decision. The Third Judicial Department is not known for its haste.
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