Re: Eminant domain run amuck
This may clear up some things on eminent domain. This is the policy totally run amuck. I don't know how many are familiar with the Tocks Island dam project the feds where going to do bt this is a story of the feds coming in with a heavy hand.........................................................................<br /><br />Bitterness runs through it <br /><br />Water Gap's lease program revives anger of residents forced out in 1960s<br /><br />Sunday, November 23, 2003<br /><br />BY JUDY PEET <br />Star-Ledger Staff <br /><br />It seemed like such a benign invitation. <br /><br />Come live inside one of the largest national parks east of the Mississippi. Come home to a fertile valley surrounded by waterfalls, woods and mountain vistas. A river runs through it. Raise the family in a historic house and, at the same time, save an irreplaceable piece of America's past. <br /> <br />The invitation was from the National Park Service for its Delaware Water Gap National Area Historic Leasing Program, designed to save decaying historic buildings. The idea was that the National Park Service couldn't afford to fix the houses so they offered them to people who would rehabilitate in exchange for rent. <br /><br />Except the people didn't come. <br /><br />In 10 years, there has been one new tenant. Last spring, the park service expanded the program to encourage people displaced when the park was created in 1965 to come back to live in the hauntingly beautiful but ravaged old houses. <br /><br />"We knew it would be a hard sell," said Bill Halainen, park spokesman. "There are a lot of ugly memories of the government stored in this valley." <br /><br />ANGER AND CONCERN <br /><br />Instead, the plan has revived the anger and despair felt by homeowners who were booted out nearly 40 years ago when government men descended on the valley -- some say like storm troopers, others say like locusts -- to create the $1 billion Tocks Island Dam. It was never built. <br /><br />The lease program also calls into question the ability of the National Park Service -- which owns at least 25,000 historic structures nationwide -- to fulfill its responsibility as steward of the nation's heritage. <br /><br />"The (government) has failed us and our heritage. They took houses and allowed them to fall into ruin," said historian Len Peck. "They didn't have a clue how much money would have to be poured into these properties, but that is no excuse. <br /><br />"The way things are going, I'm not sure that some of these houses that date back to the 1700s will survive my lifetime," added Peck, who is 93. <br /><br />Ruth Jones, 73, will never forget her mother's panic and her daughter's tears when U.S. Marshals showed up in 1967 "to run us off our property." <br /><br />"First they took our houses. Then they knocked most of them down. Then they neglected the historic buildings for so long, they're falling down. And now they want us to come back to the park and fix the houses back up and we don't even get to own them? <br /><br />"You gotta give them credit for a lot of nerve," said Jones. "They never even said they were sorry." <br /><br />There was, everyone agrees, a lot to be sorry for. <br /><br />TOCKS ISLAND PROPOSAL <br /><br />Forgotten history to most people outside of scholars and the few remaining displaced homeowners, the Tocks Island project began in the late 1950s when the Army Corps of Engineers decided to try its hand at the country's first water planning project to cover an entire river basin. <br /><br />The engineers envisioned a 3,200-foot dam spanning the northern portion of the Delaware River. It would create a 20,000-acre reservoir to provide flood control, recreation and a potable water supply. <br /><br />The plan also called for the government to take 47,000 acres of privately owned land to create what was called "A Central Park for Megalopolis." <br /><br />The amount of land to be bought for the project was unprecedented. The bill authorizing the project was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Sept. 1, 1965. <br /><br />That was also the day Ruth Jones' father died. <br /><br />A German immigrant, Ernest Olschewsky brought his family to the Delaware Water Gap in 1941, buying riverfront at the gap, just below where the Route 80 bridge now crosses the river. Working by hand, often by lamplight, they built a small resort with cabins, beaches and boat ramps. They built houses for themselves and, after she grew up and married, for Ruth Jones, their only child. <br /><br />The Joneses were among the vanguard of people against Tocks Island. <br /><br />"We didn't believe them. We didn't think the dam would work," a view later supported by an increasing number of geologists and engineers, recalled Jones, whose land was not in the flood basin, but taken for the adjoining recreation area. <br /><br />"We didn't think it was right to take our home and business, which was recreation on the river, so the government could go into the business of recreation on the river." <br /><br />People against the dam questioned the need, the motives, the scope and the cost projections for the project. <br /><br />Eventually they were proven right, but not before the corps acquired tens of thousands of acres of prime farmland and riverfront stretching 40 miles north of the Delaware Water Gap in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. <br /><br />All the while, the project costs of the dam kept rising. In 1962, it was projected at $90 million. By 1975, the cost was estimated in excess of $500 million, with $700 million in ancillary costs. <br /><br />A PAINFUL PERIOD <br /><br />The bitterest memories stem not from what the government did, but how it did it, according to Richard C. Albert, author of the book "Damming the Delaware. "First they went after people who vocally protested the project, whether they needed that land or not. <br /><br />"A lot of people sold willingly, but according to a (General Accounting Office) report, (the Army Corps of Engineers') offers for the land were determined by factors such as the property owner's age, business acumen and whether or not they were represented by counsel," he said. <br /><br />Two people committed suicide after being forced out, according to newspaper accounts from the time. Others stopped going to church. Others were forced to move out of the region because they couldn't replace what they sold for the money they got. <br /><br />"We tried. We bought some land in upstate New York because we couldn't afford anything near where we used to live and then rented back the house my husband was born in," said Wilma Heller, whose husband's family had lived on a farm on Route 209 for generations. <br /><br />Eventually, she said, it "just wasn't worth it." They moved away because it was too painful to stay. <br /><br />"For anybody who wasn't there at the time, it's hard to imagine the agony people went through, and for what?" Albert said. "A dam on a river that didn't need it? Recreation that was already there? Farmland that the government now leases out? Or for historic homes that the government can't afford to keep?" <br /><br />There are varying reports of how many structures were acquired between 1965 and 1975, when the Delaware River Basin Commission finally voted to kill the project. <br /><br />By then the towns of Bushkill and Dingmans Ferry were dead. Walpack's population dropped from 384 to 67. <br /><br />Halainen said park records show 10,000 "properties" were bought, but there is no official breakdown of how many people were displaced or how many buildings were involved. <br /><br />According to other estimates, more than 3,000 homes occupied by 8,000 people were bulldozed before the project was scratched. That doesn't include 25 summer camps, 125 farms, more than 100 businesses, seven churches and three schools, almost all of which are gone now. <br /><br />MILLIONS NEEDED <br /><br />At last count, there are 200 to 300 historic structures left in the park, Halainen said. To bring them up to suitable condition would cost an estimated $39 million. Last year's funding for restoration was $708,000. <br /><br />The leasing program grants a lease of 20 to 40 years to anyone who restores the property in lieu of rent. The average minimum restoration cost is between $250,000 and $500,000. <br /><br />The park service is negotiating with three prospective tenants, a bed-and-breakfast operator, an architect and a contractor. None is originally from the valley. <br /><br />Jean Zipser lives in an early 18th century structure that was the first European house built in the valley. She was born in the house 57 years ago and has lived there most of her life. <br /><br />Zipser, who was the last mayor of Pahaquarry before the little river town gave up the ghost, worries that when she dies her house too will disappear. <br /><br />"Congress and the president can talk about preserving history, but until they are willing to put up the money, our history will die."
