Takings legislation draws plenty of opposition

You know something’s up when the National Association of Counties, the National Governors Association and the Sierra Club are on the same side of an issue. I mean these are people who, if they find themselves in the same hotel, pay the housekeeping service to shortsheet each other’s beds.

Elton Gallegly has changed all that. Gallegly, a California Republican, is the farce – er, force – behind H.R. 1534, a federal takings bill that the House passed by an eminently veto-able margin in early November.

Should Gallegly’s bill become law, virtually all local government control over land development would be eliminated. Written by developers and underwritten by the National Association of Home Builders Political Action Committee, the bill would allow a developer who can’t build a mini-mall on top of a bald eagle’s nest to bypass the local administrative process, as well as the state courts, and sue for compensation in federal court.

It would also play havoc with the concept of zoning, long an indispensable weapon in the local government arsenal.

This one-size-fits-all approach was born of the premise that Americans enjoy – or should enjoy – complete and unrestricted property rights, a notion that no court in the history of the United States has upheld. I might own the little spot of land upon which my house sits, but if I want to build a Putt-Putt course on it, my neighbors can (and will) have something to say about it.

This is something environmental groups have known for years. It is also something that has put them at odds with local government organizations from time to time. (Recently, for example, local government organizations fought against a proposal to limit federal road building subsidies for the logging industry. I guess who falls where in any environmental debate depends on whose snail darter is getting gored.)

In environmental terms, the federal government has done some things well (the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, wetlands protection legislation). In effect, it has acknowledged that, while that swamp may belong to you, the wood stork it supports belongs to all of us.

This bill and its companions in the Senate represent a complete turnaround on the issue of federal-local relations, which had almost been getting to the gross-me-out, huggy-kissy stage since the passage of the unfunded mandates legislation. It is creating strange bedfellows, indeed.