Riviera Beach’s Eminent Domain Land Grab

Dec
12
2005

Riviera Beach’s Eminent Domain Land Grab

The Riviera Beach land grab for commercial development continues. City officials claimed the property to be seized was blighted, a condition for eminent domain to be enacted. The official city report has been discredited by citizens who did their own investigation.

This from the Palm Beach Post:

Marty Murphy, owner of Riviera’s Cracker Boy Boat Works, Inc.; Buddy Andre, a Singer Island cafe owner, and Gerald Ward, a consulting engineer, also questioned whether the study might be flawed. Murphy and Andre both had a personal interest: The newly declared area of slum and blight might affect their businesses. The trio scraped together $350 to pay Babson to document suspected mistakes.

Armed with a borrowed digital camera, clipboard, pen and the CRA’s colored-coded map, Babson walked street by street, up one block, down the other.

"I did about 250 homes a day," she recalls, "because that was how many pictures the digital camera would hold. It took three weeks."

When she sat down and analyzed the data, she was incredulous.

It looked like "it was done by two guys sitting in a bar and saying, ‘let’s throw this in,’ " Babson says.

She offered to share her findings at a June 2001 city meeting. No one took her up on it. So she wrapped the study in plastic and put it on her kitchen shelf. It gathered dust for a few years. When silverbugs started chewing on her paperwork, she says, "I figured I had better take it out."

Until The Palm Beach Post inquired, she had shown it to no one.

Now Babson’s dog-eared report has taken on new significance, given the controversy over Riviera’s potential for massive eminent domain.

Among the findings:

â€¢ The city’s blight study reported that the north side of a 10th Street block was vacant. It wasn’t. Four- and five-year-old homes dotted the street.

â€¢ Where some homes had double lots, the second lot was listed as vacant, inflating the number of unused properties.

â€¢ Homes in good condition were classified as dilapidated and beyond repair.

â€¢ Hundreds of mobile homes, including some that later weathered Hurricanes Frances, Jeanne and Wilma, automatically were classified as blighted due to undocumented safety problems or criticism such as "a tendency to blow over in storms."

â€¢ There were no findings of high crime rates or fires, a key justification of blight. City computers were being tweaked to accommodate a new system, according to the city’s study, and so the numbers could not be retrieved.

â€¢ Buildings in good shape were declared "functionally obsolete," defined generally as a structure which, if torn down, could be replaced with something that generated more money.

None of Babson’s findings sways Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown.

Elected four times â€” always on a redevelopment platform â€” Brown is the person mostly closely identified with the redevelopment plan. In recent days, he’s twice defended it on TV to FOX News’ Sean Hannity.

Back at his Singer Island law office, Brown grows impatient with criticism of the redevelopment. Eminent domain almost always involved poor or black people, he says. "Now, not all of the faces are black. Now, all of a sudden it’s tyranny."

Mayor Brown is an eminent domain attorney. It seems that there is a conflict of interest:

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