« Ind. Courts - "Mary Beth Bonaventura to talk about MTV series filmed in her courtroom" | Main | Ind. Gov't. - More on: Three CAFO bills to be heard by Senate committee today »
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Law - More on efforts to receive compensation for land taken to build Kentucky Camp Breckenridge
The ILB has had three entries, in 2004 and 2005, about Kentucky families' "long legal fight to get compensation for land taken from their families by the federal government to make way for a World War II training camp."
Today the Louisville Courier Journal has this story by Jim Adams headlined "O'Connor may mediate dispute." Some quotes:
Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has told a federal court that she is willing to mediate a decades-old dispute over the government's taking of nearly 36,000 acres in Western Kentucky for an Army training camp during World War II.More than $30 million appears to be at stake in the highly unusual case, in which about 1,000 former landowners and heirs complain that the federal government wrongly benefited from the sale of oil, gas, coal and other mineral rights under the land of the old Camp Breckinridge. The camp sat astride Union, Webster and Henderson counties.
The dispute was aired most recently in a class-action suit before Judge Susan G. Braden of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. To encourage a settlement, Braden proposed in December that Fred J. Fielding, who was counsel to President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1986, serve as mediator.
But on Jan. 9, President Bush announced that Fielding was returning to the White House as his general counsel.
Braden then asked O'Connor to consider mediating the case and, according to an order Braden entered last Friday, the recently retired justice agreed to do so.
Multiple legal issues remain unresolved, and Braden's order proposes that O'Connor serve as mediator "for a term of 120 days to ascertain whether a settlement may be achieved." * * *
Early in World War II, the government decided the farmland immediately east of Morganfield was prime real estate for an Army training site. So between 1942 and 1944, it initiated six condemnation actions in U.S. District Court, taking the property of hundreds of landowners.
The government paid them about $3.1 million for 35,849 acres, and Camp Breckinridge eventually held as many as 45,000 soldiers at a time.
By the 1950s, if not earlier, the government became aware of substantial oil, gas and coal reserves beneath the property -- and by the 1960s was selling off the mineral rights and the land itself.
The former landowners complained that the government sold the land in blocks too large for average individuals to buy. Such an action, they claim, violated verbal understandings at the time of the sales that the former owners would have the option of buying back their farms, should the government ever sell the property.
In addition, they argue that it was unfair for the government to profit as it did from more than $30 million in the sale of mineral rights.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 30, 2007 07:48 AM
Posted to General Law Related