The Muskogee Phoenix reports:
The Oklahoma Supreme Court made a wise decision in limiting state and local government'’s right to condemn private property in order to turn it over to private developers.
But the decision challenges last year'’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that allows condemnations for private development.
The Oklahoma high court ruled May 9 in the Muskogee County case against landowners who resisted right of ways across their properties for a waterline to supply water from Webbers Falls Reservoir to a proposed natural gas-fired power plant in Keefeton.
Here's more on it from Eugene Volokh who quotes the decision
To the extent that our determination may be interpreted as inconsistent with the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in Kelo v. City of New London, today's pronouncement is reached on the basis of Oklahoma's own special constitutional eminent domain provisions, Art. 2, §§ 23 & 24 of the Oklahoma Constitution, which we conclude provide private property protection to Oklahoma citizens beyond that which is afforded them by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In other words, we determine that our state constitutional eminent domain provisions place more stringent limitation on governmental eminent domain power than the limitations imposed by the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We join other jurisdictions including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, South Carolina, Michigan, and Maine, which have reached similar determinations on state constitutional grounds. Other states have similarly restricted the government's eminent domain power through state statute.
While the Takings Clause of the U.S. Constitution provides "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation," the Oklahoma Constitution places further restrictions by expressly stating "[n]o private property shall be taken or damaged for private use, with or without compensation." That constitutional provision additionally expressly lists the exceptions for common law easements by necessity and drains for agricultural, mining and sanitary purposes. The proposed purpose of economic development, with its incidental enhancement of tax and employment benefits to the surrounding community, clearly does not fall within any of these categories of express constitutional exceptions to the general rule against the taking of private property for private use.
To permit the inclusion of economic development alone in the category of "public use" or "public purpose" would blur the line between "public" and "private" so as to render our constitutional limitations on the power of eminent domain a nullity. If property ownership in Oklahoma is to remain what the framers of our Constitution intended it to be, this we must not do.
It appears Kelo has invigorated the concept of property rights.Socialist confiscation of property is still not popular with a large segment of America's voting public.
