This is a bit old, but it says a lot about government today.
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Land grab yields a fight
02/09/01
BY ALEXANDER LANE
THE STAR-LEDGER STAFF
The Newspaper for New Jersey
It was a brisk October afternoon in 1998 and Larry Halper, a third-generation Piscataway farmer, had just one concern -- selling what remained of his pumpkin crop before Halloween.
He was too busy working to pay attention to some local politicians holding a news conference across the street, even though they were talking about buying his farm -- one of the town's last swaths of undeveloped land -- to preserve it as open space.
Halper had told them he had no intention of selling out from under his 79-year-old mother and 80-year-old aunt, and shrugged it all off as campaign posturing.
The town did try to buy his land, though. When Halper refused to sell, the town began the process of seizing the 75 acres through condemnation. That means Piscataway buys it whether he likes it or not. And if he doesn't like the price, he has to fight it in court.
Like an increasing number of New Jersey towns, Piscataway has turned the traditional rationale for condemnation on its head.
In the past, government condemnation of property was used mostly for public improvements -- new schools, broader roads, utility easements. But now, towns are condemning land not for improvements, but to keep improvements from taking place.
"Typically condemnation is, you have a highway that's four lanes, you want to expand it to eight lanes, you end up condemning 100 feet on each side of the highway," said Mike Hardiman, a lobbyist in Washington for the American Land Rights Association, a property-rights group.
But municipalities are taking swaths of green simply because there are no houses there, and they want to keep it that way.
Hardiman and other leaders in the nationwide movement to preserve property rights call this New Jersey trend bizarre and troubling. But conservationists try to justify the extreme measure with just two words: suburban sprawl.
The trend is affecting no group of property owners more than farmers.
North Brunswick is embroiled in a legal battle to seize the 104-acre Otken farm, the township's largest tract of open space, before the family sells it to a housing developer. The Warren Township Council recently voted to condemn the Wagner farm, a 100-acre spread, while Bridgewater is considering a similar action.
"It's a sign of the times in 2001," said Peter Furey, executive director of the New Jersey Farm Bureau. "We've never had this level of residential growth and expansion into open space."
And never has the Farm Bureau devoted so much time to counseling farmers on how to preserve property rights, Furey said.
Richard Epstein, an expert on property rights, called condemnation for greenways rather than highways "a shameful kind of innovation."
"I've never heard of this before," said Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor and author of "Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain."
"The fevered minds of local government work in strange directions," he said.
The notion of the Halpers being pushed out of Piscataway does contain a certain irony, since they are Piscataway's last farming holdout.
After Route 287 cut the then-rural town in two in the late 1960s, local farmers started selling. A high school replaced the Goldberg farm, a condo complex replaced the Gerickondt farm, Rutgers University swallowed the Newman farm and so on.
Developers bought two more Piscataway farms back-to-back in 1997 and 1998.
All of these transactions were, of course, approved by the local government, leaving the Cornell Dairy Farm -- the Halpers' outfit -- as the town's last privately owned working farm.
John O'Grady, a Piscataway resident for 62 years who served on the town planning board during the 1960s and 1970s, said there was a simple reason why the board allowed mushrooming industrial parks to displace farmers and swallow open space. "Taxes," O'Grady said. "What else?"
Large farming tracts near a major highway, with room for corporate campuses and expansive parking lots, attracted industrial firms like flies to flypaper, O'Grady said.
"It was inevitable," O'Grady said. "You couldn't fight the trend of the farmers losing their land."
It all happened long before "open space" became the buzzwords they are now, O'Grady.
While Halper sees himself as the final victim in the town's ill-conceived growth planning, many in the conservation movement assert unabashedly that condemnation, though not ideal, is a justifiable means of saving the last slivers of open space.
"We advocate towns using eminent domain wherever they don't have willing sellers," said David Epstein, executive director of the Morris Land Conservancy, a Boonton conservation group.
"In my mind, what's the difference to the property owner if they take dollars to develop it or dollars to turn it into open space?" Epstein said.
The difference, say Halper and property-rights activists, is many millions. Halper said he had been offered close to $20 million for his land. Piscataway wants to pay him $4.3 million.
Property-rights advocates say owners rarely get the real value of their property in condemnations. If they try to fight the figure in court, they often get legally "bled to death" by mounting bills.
Three years after the town made its first overture, the fight to keep his family's land has consumed Halper, the once apolitical farmer.
He lines his property along Metlars Lane and Washington Avenue with signs lashing out at local officials. He gives away shirts with pictures of his daughter pining for her family's rights. He videotapes himself ranting at the Piscataway Township Council during public meetings.
"My mother wakes up in the middle of the night. She thinks the police are going to break her door down and chase her out of here," said Halper.
"We've been called foolish for sitting on valuable property like this," he said. "It's a lifestyle. My mother and my aunt want to live their lives out here, and they have a right to do that -- we thought."
"It's just a horrible, horrible thing to be put under condemnation," said Clara Halper, Larry's wife. "It's demeaning, it's degrading. It's very un-American. "
Larry Halper has another reason for fearing condemnation. He suspects the town fathers want his land not to preserve it, but to engineer their own deal to develop it in a few years.
To head off that possibility, Halper has applied for the state Department of Agriculture's Farmland Preservation Program. If accepted into the program, he would essentially sell his right to develop the land while keeping the property. At last count 483 farms totaling 71,000 acres have been preserved this way, according to state figures. About 30,000 more acres of farmland are making their way through the process.
Furey, from the Farm Bureau, said the Farmland Preservation Program is usually fair to farmers, paying them market value for their development rights. Still, it is often an unpalatable option, Furey said.
Farmers see their land as their greatest asset. Every year they have resisted selling out, that asset has appreciated. The eventual sale of that asset gleams on the horizon as a return for their years of working the land.
"From their standpoint it's theirs to liquidate," Furey said.
Alexander Lane is a reporter in the Middlesex
County bureau. He may be reached at
alane@starledger.com or (732) 634-4222.
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