The Cincinnati Beacon
Connecting the Dots on the Norwood Eminent Domain Victory
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
 Like most rational human beings, I was thrilled to see this WCPO report announcing the victory of property owners over corporate developers who tried to pull eminent domain for building offices and a strip mall. But what really seems interesting is connecting the dots on some of the players who tried to threaten private property rights in Ohio, including our old friend Richard Weiland.
First, check out this hack-job of a report by none other than Kimball Perry. Perry’s hook to the article makes rather definitive statements about the case, acting as if everything were a done deal:
Norwood properly used its power of eminent domain to take citizens’ property that will be used for a private development, an appeals court ruled Friday.
Perry buried any reference to an Ohio Supreme Court hearing between pro-developer propaganda:
“It’s clearly a complete victory for the city,” said Norwood’s attorney, Tim Burke. “We’re now in a position where four judges have looked at the city’s right to take property and all four said Norwood acted properly.”
Let’s see whether the Ohio Supreme Court agrees, countered John Kramer, spokesman for Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.C. agency fighting eminent domain cases nationally.
“It was just a rubber stamp basically of the City Council (decision),” Kramer said of Friday’s decision.
“This is the worst example of (using government power to seize private property to sell to a developer) that we have seen nationwide. It’s purely for private development.”
Rookwood Exchange is to include 200 condominiums and apartments, retail space and 550,000 square feet of office space. It is expected to add $1.8 million annually in earnings tax revenue to Norwood, a city so financially strapped that it has sometimes struggled to pay its employees. The development also will generate an additional $300,000 per year for Norwood schools.
Even check out the verb tense in the last paragraph above: for Perry, this is a done deal. (He should have written, “Rookwood Exchange hopes to include...” or “Rookwood exchange proposes...") Turns out he was wrong. But that’s not the real meat of our story.
The developer hoping to build Rookwood Exchange is Jeffrey Anderson. In short, Anderson wanted to jump on the bandwagon of taking a Hyde Park subdivision’s name to encourage upscale shopping in Norwood—which people in Hyde Park would otherwise associate with low-class.
Now, surely we all realize that any private developer hoping to push a corporate agenda through government processes will need a lobbyist. Enter our good friend Richard Weiland, the listed agent for Jeffrey Anderson.
Some will be wondering, so what? Who cares? These are good questions. But for now, I’m just noticing whenever these players from the inner-sanctum show up. We must watch them—stake them out in their natural environment—if ever we are to learn the secrets of their society.
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