Cheap legislative tricks won’t assuage the public’s anger.

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http://www.fayettevillenc.com/article?id=236301Published on Thursday, June 29, 2006

Our View:

Cheap legislative tricks won’t assuage the public’s anger.

State lawmakers, led by Democrats from big cities, have just heeded the whispered pleadings of municipal governments and lobbyists and refused to provide meaningful protection against abuse of the power of eminent domain.

They’ll deny it — puff themselves up for cameras, fire off indignant letters to the editor, compose scholarly dissents for the op-ed page. But it’s true all the same. The property-owning public just got rolled.

You won’t see the bylines, let alone the faces, of the officials who did the pleading. That work will be left to the N.C. League of Municipalities. But you’ll be able to make some educated guesses if Charlotte or Fayetteville or Durham concludes that, well, maybe just this once it would be good to snap up some private property and hand it over to a developer for a project that might have some downstream public benefit. Or just this twice. Or anytime the political pressure reaches the critical level.

They were going to protect us from that, first with a bill more explicitly restricting the use of eminent domain, then with a proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting seizure of private property strictly for economic development. But this week, in a slick division of labor, the House-passed bill was yanked off the Senate floor by Majority Leader Tony Rand, and the amendment was shunted off to the House Rules Committee, where chairman Mickey Michaux of Durham cheerily admitted that it was a dead letter.

Net gain for the public: zero.

Rand reports that the bill might yet return to the Senate floor before the session ends. But critics point out that getting it back to the floor won’t necessarily get it to the governor’s desk in time.

There is talk, in both chambers and from the League, about not rushing to amend the state’s constitution, and about the supposed ease with which the problem can be solved by simple statute.

What rush? The legislative history of the bill is extensive, dating from early May and passing from committee to committee. The case for an amendment rather than a statute has been out there from the day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its misbegotten ruling that turned a constitutional restraint on government into a license to steal.

A law would be an improvement because existing law doesn’t cover everything that needs covering. But the reason a constitutional amendment is needed is that an amendment, unlike a law, can’t be quietly amended every whipstitch to suit the convenience of whoever wields the most money or clout.

Advice to lawmakers: Do one, or do the other; but don’t expect to do nothing and dance away from this fray unmarked.

Copyright 2006 - The Fayetteville (NC) Observer