The U.S. Supreme Court will meet today to discuss whether to re-evaluate the legality of eminent domain for Columbia’s 17-acre Manhattanville campus expansion.
If the court decides to grant certiorari—the official term for agreeing to hear a case—it will throw the expansion into legal limbo once again. If it denies certiorari, the state will be able to seize private properties on the University’s behalf. Typically, the court, which has officially scheduled this case for “conference” today, grants just one percent of all petitions for certiorari, so the odds are in favor of Columbia’s project.
At stake are the only properties in the expansion zone—from 125th to 134th streets, from Broadway to 12th Avenue—that Columbia does not yet own: Nick Sprayregen’s four Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage locations and two gas stations owned by Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur. Under eminent domain, the state would turn the properties over to the University in exchange for market-rate compensation for Sprayregen, Singh, and Kaur.
“The significance is huge,” Norman Siegel, who is Sprayregen’s attorney and the former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said on Thursday. “If they decide to hear our case, then the issue will be front and center before the Supreme Court of the United States.”
Singh and Kaur have argued that their business is their livelihood and should not be taken from them.
“I need a fair deal from the Supreme Court,” Kaur said on Thursday. “The way the law is now, rich people can do what they want to do—they can do anything. If the decision goes for the rich people, for Columbia, then in the future, poorer people will not have the right to live.”
For Sprayregen, it is also about fighting the state on principle.
“It is a tremendous feeling of violation, it really is,” Sprayregen said in an interview with Spectator last month. “You’re being violated by the very government that’s supposed to protect your rights but instead is merely doing the bidding of the highest bidder, so to speak.”
The legal battle began in December 2008, when the Empire State Development Corporation, the state agency that approves eminent domain, deemed the neighborhood “blighted,” paving the way for the use of eminent domain.
Sprayregen, Singh, and Kaur filed lawsuits shortly thereafter. In December 2009, the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division struck down ESDC’s approval of eminent domain. In a harshly worded ruling, Justice James Catterson said that the project could not qualify as a “public use” because Columbia is an “elite,” private institution. He also cited a common accusation that there was “collusion” between the University and the consulting firm, AKRF, that declared Manhattanville blighted. This accusation stems from the fact that, while conducting the blight study, AKRF also had a contract with the University.
ESDC then appealed, and the New York State Court of Appeals overturned the Appellate Division ruling in June 2010. The Court of Appeals—the highest court in New York state—ruled that the project did constitute a public use because it will create jobs and foster scientific research and noted that a second firm unaffiliated with Columbia had affirmed AKRF’s finding of blight.
From there, the property holdouts’ only recourse was the U.S. Supreme Court, which has supported eminent domain in the past—most recently, in 2005, the court ruled in the landmark Kelo v. New London case that eminent domain could be used to transfer properties from one private owner to another.
But Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a concurring opinion that there were certain situations in which this precedent would not apply—namely, if eminent domain “is intended to favor a particular private party, with only incidental or pretextual public benefits.”
“Our position is consistent with Justice Kennedy’s position in Kelo v. New London,” David Smith, attorney for Singh and Kaur, said on Thursday. “It is imperative that the court should hear our case.”
If the Supreme Court refuses the case, though, “Our options are over,” Smith said. “Columbia has already started to take action on this procedure [eminent domain] in order to remove parties by condemnation. … I’m sure that would be started immediately thereafter. There’d be nothing for us to do, but obviously, I’m hoping we never get to that point.”
Robert Kasdin, senior executive vice president of the University, said in a recent interview, “I don’t have any inside lines into the Supreme Court and as a result, whenever they conference it, they conference it, and we’ll look forward to their decision.”
Smith said he expects the court to make its decision by Monday.
“I’ve been an eternal optimist,” Siegel said in an interview last month. “There’s so many times that people have told me there is no chance. It’s a good fight. I think if somehow the court took it, it’d be a national issue.”
Sam Levin contributed reporting.
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