Unfair offers
Lawmakers need to fix flaw in condemnations

Rocky Mountain News

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Email this Print this Comments Change text size Subscribe to print edition iPod friendly Share this site Several months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London - which expanded the right of local governments to condemn property for private development - analysts at Golden’s Independence Institute approached state lawmakers with an intriguing proposal.

As the institute’s Jessica Peck Corry tells it, they sought to draft “model legislation that would guarantee that all individual property owners [facing eminent domain negotiations] would receive at least the assessed value of their property.” But the idea was pooh-poohed because, in Corry’s words, “we were told . . . fair market value never fell below assessed value.”

Well, “never” has arrived. As the Rocky’s Kevin Flynn reported this week, a down real estate market has found the Regional Transportation District making some eminent domain offers to land owners along its West Corridor light-rail line that “in some cases . . . are lower than the county assessors’ values.”

In one instance reported by Flynn, business partners Terry Smith and Robert Guy have been offered $160,000 for property that has been assessed at a value of $173,500. This is simply not right. Why should government be able to offer less for a property than the value on which that property owner is being taxed by government?

Under normal circumstances, most property owners who want to sell would wait out a depressed real estate market. They’d hold out for an improved economy where they might make a profit on the sale, or at least break even. But eminent domain procedures - despite regulations calling for offers of “fair market value” - leave sellers little choice about when their property is sold.

Corry is right: It’s only common sense that those enduring a property condemnation at least be compensated at the level they’re being taxed. That’s why we’re glad to learn that she and her colleagues at the institute are pursuing their model legislation that addresses this discrepancy. We hope fair-minded lawmakers will give it careful consideration and use it to craft and pass a law that will protect individual property owners.

One curious irony in all this is RTD’s unwillingness to part with its own property at a loss. Again as reported by Flynn this week, RTD now has on its hands 315 acres of land it acquired in a failed real estate deal with Union Pacific Railroad. The transit agency doesn’t need the land, and “voted Tuesday night to try to sell it off - but only if it can get back the total $18.2 million it paid.”

RTD should be required to extend the same courtesy to those in the path of its West Corridor light-rail line.

This column originally appeared in Human Events on May 9, 2008

Hippies, Inc. at Gypsy House Cafe

Once upon a time, liberals could protest without first putting out a press release. How times have changed.

As Denver prepares for its 15 minutes in the national spotlight as the host of this summer’s Democratic National Convention, national and local protesters are also seeking their moment of televised glory. A local group called “Re-Create 68,” or R-68 for short, is now proclaiming that it anticipates 50,000 people will take to the streets to protest America’s “two-party system that allows imperialism and racism to continue unrestrained.”

At first glance, it appears that R-68 organizers — many of whom weren’t born until a decade or more after 1968 — are eager to mimic that year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, most frequently recalled for violent clashes between protestors and police.

As the R-68 Web site proclaims, “Sometimes we need to look back to move forward. In 1968 there existed a spirit of change, the Paris Rebellion, Prague, Chicago, Vietnam, etc. People believed, around the world, that they were capable of taking over the institutions that controlled their lives. The smell of revolution was in the air. Over 1 million college students openly identified as revolutionist.”

But while the prospects of 50,000 radicals coming together in Denver was enough to make radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh sing with glee on his radio show late last month, the fact of the matter is that whatever happens in Denver this August will likely disappoint those eager for a Democratic convention meltdown.

The main reason: The anarchist-hippies in charge are downright organized, committed to an institutional structure that would be the envy of most corporations. As a disclaimer on the R-68 Web site proclaims, “Recreate 68 is not a throwback group trying to relive some vision of glory days long gone.” This is whole new kind of protesting.

R-68 organizers, representing several different grassroots groups, meet weekly at the Gypsy House Café, a family-owned coffee shop located four blocks from my house in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The place overflows with self-denying capitalists eager to make a quick buck. A dread-locked man named Nottidreads will provide you your “short numerology chart analysis” for only $10.

According to Nottidreads, who completed Barack Obama’s chart, the Democratic presidential candidate “secretly dreams of having a big impact on the world. . . .It is the paradox of [his] Heart’s Desire that [he] receives by giving. Both [his] material success and spiritual satisfaction are made possible through service and sacrifice to others.” Wow, that’s deep.

At the Gypsy House, you can also buy candles “blessed with magic” and Italian gelato made from all-natural ingredients at almost $3 a bowl. During my most recent trip there, I overheard a young Iraq veteran talk about his spiritual awaking during his second tour of duty. His goal: To reconcile differences between his pagan and Buddhist foundations.

This ain’t no Starbucks. And every Thursday, R-68’s organizers gather there to talk strategy. At a recent meeting, about a dozen people attended. The climate was polite and the focus was on unity. In between these meetings, organizers are keeping themselves busy. This week alone, supporters can attend two fundraisers, including a concert by the “Dead Prez,” where tickets will set you back $20.

Leading the effort is Glenn Spagnuolo, 37, a one-man press machine who first became a household name with Denver reporters for his support of former University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill — a man who compared 9-11 terrorism victims to Nazis, falsely proclaimed Native American ancestry and who was ultimately fired for plagiarizing the works of academic scholars in an effort to mischaracterize major historical events.

In his role heading up R-68, Spagnuolo makes Churchill look mild. But while he says things like “If Denver needs to become Ground Zero in the fight to take back our rights, it will,” he is hardly the hardened activist he portends to be. And while he proclaims a distain for mainstream media, telling the Rocky Mountain News, “I’m not in this for myself; that’s why I don’t want this to be about me,” he never misses an opportunity to jump in front of a camera.

Spagnuolo is clandestine about his past, and there appear to be many reasons why. According to a local expose in the city’s Westword newspaper, he attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. This is the 21st Century face of anarchy.

Limbaugh’s “dreams” of Denver riots came after Spagnuolo and friends became angry in March after they were denied an event permit at the city’s Civic Center Park, a spot highly coveted for its location just steps from the state Capitol, City Hall, the city’s two newspapers, and the state Supreme Court. Re-Create 68 lost out in a city lottery to the DNC’s host committee.

“When things blow up because the police have to enforce a permit that the Democrats go, don’t blame us for that,” Spagnuolo told The Rocky Mountain News. “Blame the Democrats for trying to silence dissent in the city of Denver.”

Spagnuolo has since backtracked on such statements, pledging a non-violent movement and saying it is the police who have created a threat of violence. He has spent the last month conducting serious damage control, recently announcing that he will turn Civic Center Park into a tent city protestors are now calling “Free City.”

With the press predictably in tow at a recent press conference, Spagnuolo proclaimed that “Nobody should be excluded from using a public park,” and indicated that he will encourage people to violate the city’s prohibition on overnight camping there.

Spagnuolo now claims he is not planning to organize an event at the park in violation of the policy. “If something collective happens, it will be organic,” he told reporters. And maybe he means it. Violence would run directly contrary to a proposed “Tent city”, which organizers have said will operate on a “10-point program” that includes being free of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Organizers have suggested there may be open sex acts in the park as well as a “nude-in” where “peace” will be spelled out through a giant sea of naked bodies.

While those organizing the love-in announced that they are splitting with Spagnuolo this week over concerns about his violent rhetoric, the rest of us have little to be concerned about. Ultimately, Spagnuolo’s goal in life is to see his face plastered on CNN. It’s unlikely he’ll have access from a Denver jail cell. And even he is forced to admit that 2008 is not 1968, conceding that calls for revolution are now more frequently ignored by young people. Maybe they just have a lot to worry about, like making sure their coffee is fair trade, organic, and served in only biodegradable, post-consumer recycled containers.

This column originally appeared in the May 6, 2008 Denver Post
It’s RTD versus the little guys
Small-business owners are likely to lose as FasTracks growth results in seized property in west Denver.

By Jessica Peck Corry and Kate Melvin

At the corner of West 14th Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard in Lakewood, one couple’s American Dream lingers on the verge of collapse. The reason, they say: RTD’s overzealous condemnation efforts.

In 2004, 54 percent of metro-area voters approved an expansion of Denver’s FasTracks, an RTD light-rail system promoted as a way to ease congestion for commuters. While the initial transportation package, which also included new buses, stood at $4.7 billion, now the total taxpayer investment has ballooned to more than $6.1 billion. An additional $400 million in new cost overruns is also expected.

To help subsidize its increased costs, RTD officials are now pursuing private development projects they say will help keep the overall price tag more manageable for taxpayers. There is just one problem with this strategy: Property owners in the path of such projects may be forced to forfeit their land to make way for pricey high-rise condos and coffee shops.

Galen Foster and Kim Snyder, owners of Lakewood’s Pro-Tint Window Tinting, are living this reality. The couple is the first to admit that sometimes eminent domain — the forced condemnation of private property for a public good — is unavoidable. This public good, they concede, can include public transportation projects like FasTracks.

What Foster and Snyder say they cannot accept, however, is that they are being threatened with condemnation not for new FasTracks rails or a rail station, but rather so that RTD can turn their property into a massive private-development project, of which a parking garage would be just a small portion. Further, Foster and Snyder point out that there are more desirable locations for the garage — closer to a proposed FasTracks station.

RTD defends its pursuit of the couple’s property, saying that the garage is essential to the project and that adding several stories of privately funded residential and commercial development above and around it would ultimately benefit taxpayers.

If private development is RTD’s goal, Foster and Snyder maintain that they shouldn’t be excluded from the process. Foster has publicly said that he’d consider redeveloping the property. When he approached RTD about doing so, he was told that he could put in a redevelopment bid after his property had been condemned.

Ultimately, RTD has no interest in doing business with Foster and Snyder — it seeks only to take their business. The loss of their unique property would be devastating not only for Foster and Snyder, but also for their surrounding community. While RTD would be required to help them relocate their 25-year-old business, they would have a difficult (if not impossible) time trying to find a suitable replacement.

Foster and Snyder’s business is about as unique as they come. In addition to selling window tinting, the couple sells Native American art, including authentic totem poles. They live in the back of the business, in a 5,000-square-foot ranch-style home, with Dobermans that they have rescued from abusive homes. While the situation might be too unconventional for most, Foster frequently talks of the “love affair” the couple has built there, not only with each other, but also with their land.

Bob Hoban, the couple’s attorney, argues that under state law, RTD is not entitled to take the land for anything other than transit-related purposes. He specifically points to reform legislation passed by state lawmakers in 2006 that sought to put the brakes on aggressive eminent domain pursuits. But this hasn’t been enough to stop RTD.

In an effort to bolster the couple’s case, Hoban and a coalition of dozens of property-rights activists pursued House Bill 1278, legislation that in its original form would have explicitly prohibited RTD from taking his clients’ property. While the bill survived adverse amendments, it was restored to its original form last week before being toppled by RTD’s team of top lobbyists and killed in the Senate’s Local Government Committee.

Snyder was at the Capitol when she got word that the bill had been killed, and broke down in tears. Before receiving a letter last fall from RTD telling her that her property was being targeted, she says she started every day at 4:30 a.m. Now, she barely sleeps a few hours a night. Scared she will lose everything, she still clings to the hope that legislators will do the right thing and protect her from being forced off her land. But the momentum is not in her favor.

Furthering the concerns of dozens of property owners along RTD’s west corridor is another bill passed this month that will allow RTD to issue tax exempt financing to private developers seeking to develop properties of those like Foster and Snyder’s. According to Hoban, real estate developers have now been given a perverse incentive to stay silent as small-business owners and working families are being pushed out to make way for more lucrative private projects.

Last month, RTD was questioned by the Denver Regional Council of Governments for understating its cost estimates. And while RTD may be bad at math or overly optimistic in its fiscal projections, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to make up funding shortfalls by forfeiting their land. Eminent domain for such purposes is illegal and unconstitutional, but RTD and its team of lawyers can afford to take the chance of getting sued, knowing litigation is out of the realm of possibility for most of the property owners it targets.

When RTD says its needs to condemn property for light rail, Hoban warns people to be skeptical. While you may be envisioning new tracks, a rail station, or a parking garage, it may just be a Starbucks and expensive lofts that pop up instead.

Jessica Peck Corry serves as the director of the Independence Institute’s Property Rights Project (www.propertyrightsproject.org). Kate Melvin is a research assistant for the project.

This column originally appeared at www.PoliticsWest.com on May 1, 2008

By Jessica Peck Corry

As Colorado Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff leads the charge to raise taxes yet again on Colorado’s working families, he is doing so with a solid strategy in mind. He is running against Douglas Bruce.

Bruce, the author of Colorado Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, has become the state’s poster child for bad behavior. During his four-month tenure this spring as a freshman member of the state’s House of Representatives, he has earned plenty of enemies.

Bruce started off his first week in office this January with a bang, garnering national media attention for kicking a Rocky Mountain News reporter. Over the next three months, he earned the occasional headline for his politically incorrect and troublesome antics. After a floor rant last week, however, where he called migrant farm workers “illiterate peasants,” most fellow lawmakers finally made the decision to ignore the Colorado Springs Republican.

That is except for Romanoff, who benefits by having Bruce as his most ardent foe. Romanoff, the Golden Boy for the state’s Democrats, wants to use his final days in office (he is term-limited this year) to gut the spending limits set under Bruce’s TABOR, a 1992 constitutional amendment approved by voters.

As Romanoff tells it, his plan would reconcile conflicts between TABOR—which requires state and local governments to go to voters for approval on all tax increases—and Amendment 23—a subsequent amendment that requires mandated spending increases annually for the state’s K-12 education system.

Romanoff initially proposed his constitutional amendment as a referendum, meaning two-thirds of the state’s 100 elected lawmakers would have had to vote in his favor to have the effort put before voters this November.

When it became clear in recent days, however, that he could only garner moderate support from those in his party, as well as a handful of weaker Republicans, a flustered Romanoff began pushing his measure as a citizen’s initiative. To get his measure on the ballot this way, he’d have to get more than 76,000 valid voter signatures and navigate a cumbersome approval process within the Secretary of State’s office. He’d also need to raise at least $300,000—and that’s not including the millions it would take for a paid-media campaign that could help ensure voter approval in November.

Enter Bruce. Not surprisingly, given recent behavior, the headlines have thus far all gone in Romanoff’s favor. Wednesday’s Denver Post carried a report headlined “Bruce’s lip sinking his ship?” while a Rocky Mountain News report was titled “Going head to head on TABOR.” Below the headline, side-by-side headshots of Romanoff and Bruce appeared. Sadly, Bruce’s bad behavior has helped ensure that the debate over Romanoff’s tax crusade becomes a battle of personalities—and not fact.

At a hearing Wednesday, Bruce unexpectedly showed up at a House State, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee hearing. He not only testified against Romanoff’s measure, but called Romanoff’s claims that his proposal would maintain a TABOR provision that allows voters to approve every tax increase “utter nonsense.”

But while Bruce is frequently off his rocker, he’s right that Romanoff’s House Concurrent Resolution 1014, dubbed “Savings Account for Education,” promises to rob taxpayers of important safeguards against excessive taxation.

Jessica Peck Corry is a public policy analyst with the Independence Institute in Golden, Colo.
While almost all other lawmakers reject Bruce’s rhetoric, many centrists and conservatives are also acutely aware of the danger of raising taxes during tough economic times. Today, ordinary taxpayers are increasingly skeptical of—and resistant to—giving their hard earned money to government.

And they should be. While most reporters remain content to continue their love affair with Romanoff, they fail to mention that this is the same guy who has sold us every other tax increase we’ve seen over the last decade. Most notably, he was the salesman for 2005’s Referendum C—where he promised us that if we gave the state $2.7 billion, he’d make sure it would go into three specific funding pools for Colorado’s colleges, health care, and K-12 education. But three years later, the cost of Ref C has more than doubled—now up around $6 billion. And we’re being told that this still isn’t enough.

With Romanoff at the helm of the House during the last legislative session, we’ve heard the following: To be good stewards of our state’s higher education system, we must vote to increases taxes on the state’s energy producers. To be good stewards of our highways, we must accept significant fee increases when we go to register our vehicles. And to make sure that we don’t bankrupt our children’s future, we must now support Romanoff’s latest proposed constitutional change. All of this just three years after we agreed to cough up $6 billion.

In Romanoff’s world, our government can never have enough money. And so in the waning days of his reign, he will do everything he can to fill the state’s coffers. He will run against Doug Bruce. In the end, however, for the Democrats’ Golden Boy, even this may not be enough.

Government Stats: Calif. Minority Students Aided By Race-Neutral Admissions
May 2, 2008
Face The State Staff Report

Proponents of a Colorado ballot initiative that would bar state-sponsored discrimination are touting college admission trends for racial minorities in California after a similar law was passed there in 1996.

The universitiesOfficial government data indicate that admissions rates and numbers of underrepresented minority groups have actually increased at seven of nine University of California campuses. Overall, black and Hispanic students represent 25 percent of new admissions in 2008, up from 18 percent in the year before anti-discrimination law Proposition 209 took effect. Since 2005 alone, the number of black and Hispanic admissions has grown by 47 percent, compared to an 11 percent increase for new white and Asian students.

“We’ve always believed that women and minorities could compete on the basis of their merit and this data proves it,” said Jessica Peck Corry, executive director of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative (Corry is also an editorial contributor to Face The State). Corry’s group supports the passage of Amendment 46, a citizen-led ballot initiative set to appear on the November statewide ballot.

Click here to read full article.