The Cynic Express(ed) 2.01: On Eminent Domain

     The Constitution of the United States is very explicit when it comes to the subject of quartering. It expressly forbids the government from arbitrarily taking an individual's home and placing soldiers in it, even in the time of war, a practice known as quartering. It upset the original colonists so much that they took up arms against it. Apparently, though, the same Constitutional provisions do not make it illegal for the government to arbitrarily take an individual's home and turn it into a quarter mile.

     And seeing the right (of way), the Kansas City, Kansas, government has decided that the public interest would best be served by taking away the homes of 150 residents of Wyandotte County and helping the Kansas International Speedway Corporation to turn the neighborhood into a 150,000 seat racetrack. Using all the tricks of the trade, which includes condemning homes of some of the forty-year residents, officials have no doubts that they will win the minor courtroom speed bumps that affected citizens will throw in their path.

     Eminent domain rarely strikes a popular note, especially among those who will lose their homes. Sometimes it may be a necessary evil, used to build highways in the name of national defense or school buildings in the name of education. But a racetrackto be run by a private corporation?

     "The protection of the area's economic interest is just as legitimate as building sewers or stringing electrical wires," says Robert Miller, attorney for the Unified Government of Wynadotte County. The end justifies the means. Somehow, It is vitally important for the Kansas City, Kansas, area to wrest some money from tourists as its industrial tax base shrinks. And, one would have to point out, their residential property tax base. If the government must strip citizens of their land at below market prices (which is the result of the condemnation that occurs when a resident refuses a government's offer to sell), so be it. This racetrack, built where the (former) residents played catch with their children, washed their dogs amid laughter and squeals of glee and sprays of wet-dog scented suds, and held family barbecues on Independence Day, this lure to draw out-of-towners with ripe wallets, represents the greatest good for the greatest number.

     After all, the 150 households represent a minority of residents, even in Kansas City, Kansas. Forty-plus years of hopes and dreams and a harvest of forty-plus years of memories (Howard Miller, World War II veteran and vocal opponent to the plan, built his house in 1952, before a great many of those in favor of the plan were born) don't produce the revenue that 150,000 screaming NASCAR fans would produce (but I suspect the memories do not produce the traffic congestion or pollution of 150,000 passenger vehicles and the necessary retinue of stock cars). Nor does the cohesive sense of neighborhood that comes with decades and generations of residency amount to much in the greater governmental scheme of things. A homeowner in an older neighborhood often pays less in taxes than a homeowner in last week's New Subdivision of the Future. The tangible good for these few does not outweigh the good for the many. Nor, would it seem, does the intangible good in the mere concept of private ownership of property seem to outweigh the immediate potential for more income provided by Kansas International Speedway Corporation.

     Something must have been lost in the translation from the King's English in which Jeremy Bentham popularized the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number. Of course, he was writing on behalf of the middle class pitted against the landed aristocracy of Britain before the popular election of Parliament. He sought to give voice to those who had less land than the lords, ladies, earls, and marquis of his day. From these origins and John Locke's treatises on government and the idea of personal property sprang our nation, mixing the greatest good for the greatest number with individual liberty. The Kansas City, Kansas, government certainly breaks with that tradition by taking land from the middle class and giving it to a more powerful single holder, a corporation with International aspirations woven right into its name.

     Whether misreading, misinterpreting, or merely ignoring the latter, government officials wave the ideal and the corrupting power of eminent domain like a wand to lure tourism, sight unseen, to the region. The other components thrown into the boiling pot include the gentle (bloodless, anyway) seizure of private land from its individual owners and a corporation unable to come to a fair, free market agreement with those individual land owners. With an uttered mantra ("The greatest good for the greatest number" or "Public purpose and public need"), presto! An economically viable region with an expanding tax base that I would not want to call home.