California Town Doesn't Like Wal-Mart So It Wants to Use Eminent Domain

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Leave it to a small East Bay city named Hercules to go toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart.

No other city in America has considered standing up to the nation's largest retailer quite like the bedroom community of 24,000 on the Contra Costa County shore that is named for the Greek mythological hero and was once home to a major dynamite plant.

While other cities have rejected Wal-Mart store proposals, the Hercules City Council is to vote Tuesday on whether to begin eminent domain proceedings to forcibly take 17.27 acres from the company, which wants to put a big-box store near an upscale new residential neighborhood next to San Pablo Bay.

Hercules officials and many residents say they envision the former company town becoming like Sausalito or Tiburon, and they fear that a giant discount store would wreak havoc on a half-decade of planning for a bayside village of high-end shops and homes designed to be friendly toward pedestrians.

"One of the main reasons we were drawn to this area was the character Hercules is aiming for with the new waterfront development,'' said David Robinett, an attorney who moved to the city last year with his fiancee from Sacramento. "There was imagination and vision at the beginning of this process."

Others are more blunt.

"I don't want to have anything ghetto around me and my family,'' said Monique Howell, 25, who 18 months ago paid $652,000 for a two-story Craftsman-style home where she lives with her husband and infant son.

The possibility of the city using of eminent domain comes after the retailer rejected its offer to buy the land earlier this year, and a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that local government can force property owners to sell out to make way for private development that city officials determine would benefit the public.

Wal-Mart promises to put up a fight that will cost the city dearly.

"We think it's clearly wrong for the city to take private property for political reasons,'' said company spokesman Kevin Loscotoff, predicting that litigation would cost the city millions of dollars.

They sure hate low income people out in Northern California.As you can see majority voting is nothing more than organized theft.