PETER APPLEBOME / Our Towns
NORTH HILLS, N.Y.
If they ever decide to rewrite "The Great Gatsby" as a land-use and property law textbook, it will read pretty much like the battle between the haves and have-mores now playing out on the North Shore of Long Island.
In one corner is the Deepdale Golf Club, ensconced for the past 50 years in what was once Tullaroan, the 40-room English manor on 175 acres owned by J.P. Grace. Its members over the years have included presidents, tycoons and notables as diverse as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Tom Brokaw and Sean Connery.
In the other is the village of North Hills, once the preserve of Gatsby-era horse farms and estates, now a tiny warren of gated communities and high-end homes on less than three miles of land off the Long Island Expressway. In fact, its officials have said, North Hills has just about everything except one thing: its own community golf course for the use of the village, which is something residents of the neighboring villages of Lake Success and Sands Point have.
And so, in a rather startling entry into terrain once associated with condemning land for highways or bulldozing blighted communities, North Hills is considering using powers of eminent domain to take the golf course from its current members and to give it to the residents of North Hills.
This might have been a dubious proposition at any time in a community that already has 20 golf courses within five miles and more than 50 within 15 miles. But coming on the heels of last year's United States Supreme Court ruling that turned eminent domain from an obscure land-use issue into dinner table and talk radio red meat, it feels like it has a certain kamikaze quality.
Village officials have coveted Deepdale for years. In 2002, after the village was cited as the richest community in the Northeast in a Census Bureau survey, its mayor at the time, John M. Lentini, told Newsday:
"We believe our acquisition of the Deepdale Country Club will be the crown jewel of our community and bring us to a new level of North Shore Gold Coast affluence."
The idea was that a golf club, valued at about $100 million, would raise the village's status and property values even more. But there was one minor problem: the golf course has no interest in being acquired.
Members say that if this is a valid use of eminent domain, almost anything is.
"It's surreal," said John Wilson, retired from Wall Street, the club's secretary and its only member who lives in North Hills. "Someone can take your golf course, and give it to someone else as a golf course? I don't think you can steal someone else's property and call it an amenity."
Or, as the course argues in a lawsuit trying to stop any eminent domain
actions:
"Under North Hills' logic, the government could just as well seize private homes, throw out their residents, and reopen the properties as "public" luxury spas or dining clubs, merely by claiming that this would increase the value of the surrounding private homes."
So far the village has been taking a public relations beating, something Mayor Marvin Natiss attributes to a well-orchestrated and vengeful public relations campaign on behalf of the club.
"They threatened me and said they would make it ugly," he said in a brief telephone interview.
He said the village had made no decision on whether to proceed. In a March 23 letter to residents, he wrote: "As your mayor, I do make one commitment to you. Whatever decision is made by the village government and our residents, it will not be a result of the deceitful threatening tactics on the part of the Deepdale Golf Club and its representatives."
But it's also possible that the village is taking a beating because it would be hard to imagine a municipality coming up with a more tone-deaf proposal.
The New London decision may have opened up some doors for eminent domain, but legal experts say it was hardly a blank check. George Conway, a lawyer for the club, says that by requiring courts to carefully scrutinize a government's intended purpose in taking property, it can have the result of enhancing judicial review.
Thomas W. Merrill, a law professor at Columbia University and an expert on eminent domain, called its use in this case "bizarre," and said the backlash to the New London decision would make a proposal to push the borders of eminent domain highly problematic.
"It seems to me like you are courting disaster by using eminent domain in a highly unusual and aggressive way," he said.
But then, back in Gatsby's day of fabulous wealth, when nothing seemed unattainable, they knew all about courting disaster, too. And so, as the land-use lawyers say, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Return to Media Coverage index |
