As the date for the Court of Appeals hearing on the use of eminent domain for Columbia's Manhattanville campus looms tomorrow, both sides are polishing their legal arguments. The attorneys for each party will have 20 minutes to present. The briefs they submitted to the court in April give a good indication of the arguments they plan to make.
The Manhattanville property holdouts—Nick Sprayregen, Gurnam Singh, and Parminder Kaur—are known officially as the “petitioner-respondents,” and the Empire State Development Corporation—the state body that approved eminent domain and is now appealing the lower December court ruling—is known as the “respondent-appellant.”
Read our timeline of the history of this land use battle here, and a summary of the past court decisions and what's at stake tomorrow here. Below, we've outlined the main arguments to be made tomorrow, based on the briefs each party filed with the court. You can read the full texts of the petitioner-respondents' brief here, and the respondent-appellant's brief here.
Petitioner-respondents
The brief for Sprayregen, Singh, and Kaur argues that eminent domain in Manhattanville is illegal on the following bases:
• ESDC’s determination that the area was blighted was made in “bad faith.”
The brief claims that ESDC and Columbia decided to pursue eminent domain and then looked for blight in order to justify an already-established policy: “The Columbia plan was fully formulated, accepted by EDC [the New York City Economic Development Corporation], and by ESDC, prior to any investigation of any alleged condition of blight in the area and despite the fact that the just completed West Harlem Master Plan process had made findings and announced policies incompatible with Columbia’s plan. The effort to find blight in the area only came later, in an attempt to find legal justification for a policy already adopted.” It further argues that ESDC acted in “bad faith” by hiring the consulting firm Allee King Rosen & Fleming to determine whether the neighborhood was blighted when AKRF was already a contractor for Columbia. This, the petitioners say, constituted illegal “collusion” between ESDC and Columbia and should invalidate the results of the blight study and ESDC’s December 2008 approval of eminent domain.
• ESDC’s determination of blight was “palpably unreasonable.”
According to the brief, the ESDC-commissioned blight study examined the area selectively and thus found blight where none existed. “The reams of photographs in the AKRF and Earthtech studies, because of their selective focus, do not constitute objective evidence of the condition of whole buildings, much less the whole area,” it reads. “There never was a reasonable investigation to determine if the area was blighted. Because the facts represented were driven by a predetermined conclusion, and other available facts were ignored, the studies upon which ESDC relied lack rational basis.” To support this claim, Sprayregen and his attorney, Norman Siegel, submitted to the court a “no-blight study”: They conducted their own evaluation of neighborhood conditions and concluded that any blight that did exist was on Columbia-owned properties.
• The expansion does not constitute a “civic project,” as required by eminent domain law in the absence of blight.
In addition to arguing that the project will revitalize a blighted area, ESDC and Columbia argue that the project will bring educational and civic benefits to the area. However, the Manhattanville holdouts’ brief says, “The record clearly demonstrates that the project was never originally intended or designed to advance educational, civic, or public purposes, but, rather, had always been envisioned as an economic development project. This late-breaking attempt to rescue the project—which lacked any prior basis or analysis—was simply an after-the-fact attempt by ESDC to hedge its bets and ensure that it would be able to exercise eminent domain.” The brief argues—and the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division affirmed in the December ruling that the Court of Appeals is now reexamining—that the expansion of a private university does not constitute a civic project under the Urban Development Corporation Act.
• ESDC violated Nick Sprayregen’s due process rights by withholding documents requested under the Freedom of Information Law.
Over the course of several years, Sprayregen and Siegel have requested hundreds of documents from ESDC on the eminent domain approval process. ESDC provided most of those documents but withheld a few, and the Court of Appeals ruled last December in a separate case filed by Sprayregen that he was entitled to those documents and ordered ESDC to release them. ESDC did so, but by that time, the pending eminent domain case was closed to new supporting evidence. Thus, the brief argues that Sprayregen’s “right to be heard” was violated. The Appellate Division affirmed that reasoning in its ruling in December.
• The expansion is not a “carefully considered plan.”
While the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Kelo v. City of New London upheld the use of eminent domain for the purpose of economic development, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion noted that eminent domain was permissible in that particular case but might not be in others, if the plans for economic development were not sufficiently defined and supported. The Manhattanville holdouts argue that the plans are insufficient in this case.
• The term “substandard and insanitary” as a criterion for blight is “unconstitutionally vague.”
The brief states that this definition from the Urban Development Corporation Act “does not give fair notice to individuals of the criterion on which blight can be found, and permits ESDC to discriminate against different developers and property owners,” and thus “is void for vagueness … in violation of both the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and Article I, Section 6 of the New York State Constitution.”
Respondent-appellant
The brief for ESDC argues that eminent domain is legal in Manhattanville on the following bases:
• ESDC’s determination of blight cannot be rejected as biased simply because Columbia participated in the process.
Contrary to the petitioners’ assertion that ESDC effectively approved the project and then looked for blight as a justification after the fact, ESDC’s brief states, “ESDC properly commissioned and completed its neighborhood conditions reports before it initiated the public approval process. … The fact that ESDC began to consider the proposed Project before it commissioned these studies does nothing to establish that blight remediation was an afterthought.” The process by which ESDC determined that the area was blighted, and the overall process for the approval of eminent domain, were “thorough and complied with all applicable statutory requirements.” To ensure a thorough, fair evaluation of the neighborhood, the brief states, ESDC conducted three independent studies: one by architectural planning firm Urbitran, one by AKRF, and—in response to the criticism of AKRF also being a Columbia contractor—one by Earth Tech, Inc. In August 2008, ESDC released the AKRF and Earth Tech studies for public consideration.
• ESDC had a rational basis for its finding of blight, and did not act in bad faith.
The blight studies, the brief states, were not selective. Photographs and other documents showed existing—not potential—blight, and “there is no dispute regarding the facts documented by the consultants,” the brief reads. “When separated from the allegations of bad faith, Petitioners’ argument reduces to whether the buildings are deteriorated and obsolete enough, and whether the area is undeveloped or under-developed enough, to support ESDC’s finding. That Petitioners’ views differ from ESDC’s findings … is an insufficient ground to reject ESDC’s findings.” ESDC further argues that there is no evidence that AKRF doctored or exaggerated any of the results of the blight study in favor of Columbia, and also no evidence that Columbia created blight in the area: “Building conditions did not materially change for the worse after Columbia purchased them. … Columbia sought to stabilize the already deteriorated buildings it purchased, tenant occupancies largely continued, and the blight in the area long preceded Columbia’s acquisitions.”
• The expansion does qualify as a civic project and will serve a public purpose.
The Urban Development Corporation Act defines a civic project as one benefiting “educational, cultural, recreational, community, municipal, public service or other civic purposes.” It does not, ESDC’s brief argues, distinguish between public and private education. “There can be no dispute,” it reads, “that a university serves a public, educational purpose in the most traditional sense of the word.” It further argues that eminent domain does not require universal public access; it simply requires a public purpose. Thus, Columbia’s selective nature would not disqualify it, according to ESDC.
• The petitioners-respondents’ due process rights were not violated.
According to ESDC, Sprayregen and Siegel failed to demonstrate that the documents withheld would have changed the outcome of the case. Petitioners, the brief argues, are not entitled “to thwart indefinitely any public project that permits public comments. … Petitioners are entitled to a meaningful opportunity to be heard, not an opportunity to stop an administrative proceeding dead in its tracks while contested FOIL requests wind their way through the courts.” The petitioners submitted over 10,000 pages of documents to the court, and ESDC responded to all the comments raised, the brief says.
• The criteria for blight are not “void for vagueness.”
All statutes have a strong presumption of constitutionality, so there is a heavy burden on anyone attempting to prove them unconstitutional, the ESDC brief states. Furthermore, “the void for vagueness doctrine does not apply to statutes that do ‘not purport to define the lawfulness or unlawfulness of either conduct or speech,’” according to Nyeholt v. Secretary of Veterans Affairs. In the Manhattanville case, the brief states, “the ‘substandard and insanitary standard’ allows ESDC to exercise the power of eminent domain; it does not purport to regulate private conduct by deeming property that does not meet the standard unlawful.”
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