Flooding farms without paying a price

By Kyle Scott

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Flooding one town to save another doesn't make much sense to most people, but that is precisely what the national government has decided to do. The government justifies its position through a cost-benefit analysis of the action. But people cannot just be plugged into an equation.

In trying to save additional areas from the floods that have ravaged the Midwest much of this spring, the Army Corps of Engineers decided the best course was to blow a hole in one section of the levee that would flood nearly 132,000 acres of farmland that included hundreds of homes. People lost their homes and their livelihood. These farmers will miss at least an entire year of productivity even after they rebuild their homes. And to make matters worse, the government has not reimbursed them for this taking as required by the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The 5th Amendment requires the government to provide just compensation when private property is taken for public use. Of course, the Supreme Court has loosened the public-use requirement in recent years, particularly in the infamous Kelo v. City of New London, where the Court upheld the action of New London, Conn., when it seized low-income homes in order to build new upscale residences. Because the high-income homes would produce greater tax revenues which could then be used by the government for the benefit of all citizens, the Court decided that the public-use requirement was satisfied.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when Missouri appealed to the Supreme Court to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from blowing the levees along the Mississippi, the Court refused to hear the case. Now it seems the government is exempt from fulfilling its obligation to compensate for a taking. While the Court's refusal to hear the case may not be the death knell in the eminent domain coffin, the finale may not be too far off.

The Supreme Court and the Army Corps of Engineers are willing to take this type of action for they are not held accountable by the public, thus making it easy for them to view us as mere statistics. But such “bean counting” has permeated through the halls of Congress and the Oval Office. Eminent domain protections have steadily decreased as our population has steadily increased.

The local and state officials along the Mississippi stood up for those they represented in a way national officials have been unwilling to do. The consequences of moving from a federal system to a more centralized system of government have rarely been more clearly seen in our nation's history.

Kyle Scott is a political science lecturer at the University of Houston and has written extensively on private property issues. Comments: kascott@uh.edu.