Jury increases parkway land payment

DUSTIN ENSINGER

Staff Writer

The pro­posed exten­sion of Sawmill Park­way might have got­ten more expensive.

A Delaware County Com­mon Pleas Court jury on Wednes­day voted unan­i­mously to award a Lib­erty Town­ship fam­ily nearly twice as much as the county orig­i­nally offered in the first emi­nent domain case related to the project.

Scott and Kathy Bauder were awarded $850,762 for 10 acres the county seized through emi­nent domain from their 47-acre Clark-Shaw Road property.

“It cer­tainly adds to the total project cost,” Delaware County Engi­neer Chris Bauser­man said. “I don’t believe it changes our com­mit­ment to the project or our abil­ity to fund it.”

While the jury awarded the Baud­ers sig­nif­i­cantly more than the $450,000 the county orig­i­nally offered, Bauser­man doesn’t view the ver­dict as a defeat.

The Baud­ers asked the county for about $1.2 mil­lion for the 10 acres needed to com­plete a por­tion of the park­way, accord­ing to Bauserman.

“The county ended up pay­ing more than we had hoped to and the prop­erty own­ers ended up get­ting less than they would hope to,” he said.

The ver­dict marks the begin­ning of a process that likely will result in 18 other emi­nent domain cases in the court. Only two of those cases are of very high value, accord­ing to Bauserman.

“Every one of these that is final­ized puts us closer to the com­ple­tion of the project,” he said.

For the Baud­ers, the ver­dict marks the end of a nine-year process.

“It’s a relief just to be done with it,” Kathy Bauder said.

After farm­ing their land for 25 years, their abil­ity to con­tinue will be ham­pered by the emi­nent domain action.

Only 11 acres of their remain­ing land will be farmable. After the park­way is built, 19.5 acres will be land­locked because of the road­way run­ning through the mid­dle of their prop­erty. Another por­tion will be too close to the new road­way to farm.

“There’s no real win­ners in this case,” Kathy Bauder said. “We still have the same prob­lem as before.”

Attor­ney Mike Braun­stein, who rep­re­sents the Baud­ers and the 18 other prop­erty own­ers fac­ing emi­nent domain, said in most cases the county’s offers have been well below mar­ket value and don’t take into account the addi­tional loss in prop­erty value that will come with prox­im­ity to a major roadway.

“There’s a lot of dam­age caused because it goes from a rural set­ting to hav­ing the park­way right next door,” he said.

Braun­stein hopes the recent ver­dict will lead to a dif­fer­ent nego­ti­at­ing strat­egy on the part of the county.

“Hope­fully, it will mean that the county will take a seri­ous look at what they are doing,” he said.

Bauser­man said there are no plans to alter nego­ti­at­ing tactics.

“I don’t think we want to make rad­i­cal changes in our nego­ti­at­ing tac­tics based on one jury deci­sion,” he said. “We take each one on a case-by-case basis.”

Fewer than five miles of road­way remain unbuilt for the Sawmill Park­way exten­sion. The remain­ing cost is esti­mated to be about $50 million.

The county and the city of Delaware are in nego­ti­a­tions to decide how much each side will pay to com­plete the project.

Posted by Dustin Ensinger on Mar 11 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.