The revised stadium agreement that D.C. United got D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to sign back in June (after threatening to back out of the deal and move to Virginia instead) required the city to either buy the stadium land or move to seize it by eminent domain by the end of September — and hey, look what day it is today! So what’d they end up doing?
As the courts closed at 5 p.m. the city had not filed [an eminent domain] suit, and Joaquin McPeek, a spokesman for Bowser’s deputy mayor for economic development, declined to comment.
Almost two hours later, McPeek said that the District had made an after-hours filing, electronically, but offered no explanation for the apparent last-minute scramble in the mayor’s office.
Anyway, the point is, D.C. is going to force the site’s property owners to sell, and then use the courts to set a price. Because a private soccer stadium is clearly a public good. I mean, if the Supreme Court says a vacant lot can be, why not?
Ah, Kelo. The fact that we didn’t have a rebellion over that ruling shows what a bunch of wimps the citizenry has become. That one called for a tanker of tar and a few railcars of feathers. Hard to imagine the stout people who rebelled against King George putting up with it.
Following Kelo’s logic, we should be able to bulldoze any neighborhood in the nation to erect taxpayer-paid stadiums. So let’s start with the team owners’ houses!
Maybe it will allow her to save some money to build a transit system to actually get the people to the stadium. It will be interesting to watch all the fans walk on surface streets through the neighborhood on gamedays–even more interesting will be watching people walk to “shop and enjoy the amenities.”