No, that could never happen…
The Golden Cicada tavern in Jersey City sits alongside some of the state’s most valuable real estate.
But when the city’s redevelopment agency moved this summer to seize the bar and the back room apartment where owner Cheng Tan lives, it wasn’t to make way for another gleaming office tower or upscale residential project.
Instead, the city plans to turn the property over to a Catholic high school, so it can expand its football field.
The religious implications outraged civil libertarians, and property rights groups, still smarting from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June, argued the city is misusing its powers of condemnation.
“This is one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain in the country,” said Steve Anderson of the Institute for Justice in Washington.
Next week, when Tan’s case goes before a judge in Jersey City, he will have the benefit of free legal advice, but his lawyers face an uphill battle. The summer court case confirmed the use of eminent domain by government to seize private land and turn it over to others for private use.
But lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, who are representing Tan, argue the redevelopment agency is violating the constitutional prohibition on favoring a religion.
“It’s inappropriate for government to take land from one person and give it to another for their personal use,” said Ed Barocas, the ACLU’s legal director in New Jersey. “It’s even more inappropriate to take it to benefit a particular religion.”
St. Peter’s Prep, a respected institution with powerful political ties, argues that after spending years and about $4 million assembling property for much-needed athletic fields, it is being held up unfairly by Tan.
The school last year built a new field adjacent to the Golden Cicada, but the Rev. James Keenan, St. Peter’s president, said it is 7 yards shy of regulation and must be lengthened for the varsity to play its home games there.
“We offered to buy the garages behind his business, which would give us enough room,” Keenan said. “That would not affect his business, but he refused.”
Keenan also stressed that Tan put his business up for sale in 1998, but the bar owner said that is irrelevant.
“My wife was sick, and I was having financial difficulties,” Tan said. “But that has nothing to do with their right to take my business. It doesn’t matter if this business was open one day or one year.”
Tan bought the bar in 1987 and Kam-sin, his late wife, ran it while he continued to work as an electrical engineer. (The bar’s name is the English translation of his wife’s Mandarin name.)
On paper, the legal argument is technically between the redevelopment agency – which is empowered by state law to seize property – and Tan. The city council in 2000 declared the area around Tan’s bar “in need of redevelopment” and designated it for open space and recreation. A lawyer for the city confirmed that the agency has an agreement to sell Tan’s property to St. Peter’s at cost if it wins the case.
Keenan said the school bought an adjacent scrap yard in 1999 and hoped, at the time, to get both Tan’s property and a neighboring rowhouse. (The elderly owner of the rowhouse has never put it up for sale, Keenan said, and the school is willing to wait him out.)
As the legal process churned slowly along, Tan became increasingly well-versed and militant about eminent domain.
“It’s like the reincarnation of Thomas Paine,” he joked, noting that eminent domain is a frequent subject of conversation among his regulars. “When the government starts ignoring property rights, we all have a serious problem.”
In 2003, the school won approval to build its elaborate practice field but soon discovered that the scrap yard was far more polluted than expected. The price of the project ballooned from $2.5 million to $4 million, Keenan said.
The school got help from the state Legislature, which, at the behest of state Sen. Bernard Kenny (D-Hudson), chipped in $250,000 for the cleanup. Kenny’s sons both attended St. Peter’s.