Mover Mike

Two stories recently on the the use of "eminent domain" in Oregon. The first,

The Port of Portland, unable to reach agreement to buy a Willamette River industrial property (owned by Mar Com), may use its eminent domain power to take the land.

The Port of Portland in 2000, sold its 57-acre shipyard on Swan Island to shipbuilder Cascade General for $30.8 million.

Mar Com's owner, Tom Maples, and others protested then that the price was too low and that the Port was subsidizing one competitor. The following year, Cascade General sold its biggest drydock to a company in the Bahamas for $25 million.

Now the Port wants Mar Com's property

The Port says the Mar Com property would allow for expansion of Toyota's auto-import operation at Terminal 4. Though the Port's container business is struggling, its car operations are booming. Toyota imports through Portland are up 11.6 percent from a year ago, to 110,184 vehicles through August.

The second instance, the Portland Development Commission (PDC) have wanted a convention center hotel for about 15 years, but no hotel chain has come in to build the hotel.

Officials contend convention organizers require large blocks of rooms -- 400 or more at a time -- for delegates attending big conferences. Proximity to the convention center, they say, would make the hotel attractive to event organizers who are influential in choosing destination cities.
[...]
The PDC has spent years planning the hotel, even using the agency's eminent domain power to force local real estate mogul Barry Menashe to sell it land for the project.

But Heywood Sanders, a national critic of taxpayer spending on convention center hotels, argues they

almost always fail to provide the convention boost cities seek. In an arms race of prestige, he says, dozens are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on expansions that flood the national convention market and hurt local hotels.

It appears to me that the Port is making decisions with no responsibility for its actions and using its power to take land to make more decisions and hurting competitors. In the second, the PDC is using its power to force land owners to sell it land based on a desire to have a hotel that apparently no hotel chain sees needed and if built, would hurt competitors. There is no freedom when eminent domain can be used like a pistol at one's head.

eminent domain Portland