Letter From Connecticut

From: Artemia Salina
Subject: Eminent Domain: Another Twist
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 04:00:48

My home town is not what it used to be. The town where I grew up was a sleepy, laid-back little place located on the coast of Connecticut. A quiet mind-your-own-business-and-we'll-mind-ours kind of place. When you were a kid in my home town, you didn't wish for a mini-bike, you wished for a small skiff with a 5 horsepower outboard motor, and you built your forts out in the salt marsh amongst the blue herons and the fiddler crabs.

I've since moved away from my home town, but not so far as to lose touch with the goings-on there, and more recently, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded my home town with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. Yes, the New Yorkers decided that it would be quaint to live in a town like my home town and so began buying up residential real estate at fantastic prices. What was bought for $125,000 five years thence is sold for $400,000 presently. And as the locals were displaced the character of the town changed. Like an infestation of hummingbirds, the New Yorkers brought with them their traditions of squawking and bickering, and sticking their vindictive beaks into other's flowers.

Well anyway, that's not the problem. The REAL problem is the Kingdom Life Baptist Church. This church is like a virus in my home town, as far as I can tell. They've been around for about ten years, slowly and quietly buying up properties, usually neighborhood bars, which they have branded as evil, and have put in their place Christian book stores and the like, which are completely tax exempt. The church has petitioned the school system in my home town, worthless as it may be, to review all of the text materials and have editorship over it in order to rid said materials of Satanic References. The main man in the church is a charismatic and quite industrious type, with a diamond ring that will blind you from across a stadium when it catches the light. Did I mention that they have a stadium-sized church building? They do, and I've been in it. It looks like the set of the 700 Club, complete with cameras and dollies. Orchids and lilies frame the multiple big screen plasma TV monitors on either side of the set, allowing the audience to see themselves on TV (jus' lahk Jerry Springer!) when the cameras pan around. It's friggin' hideous. And you know, in thinking about it, I don't think I saw one measly CROSS in the whole place. Not ONE.

Anyway, with every property they buy up, my home town loses tax revenue, the burden of which is placed squarely on the shoulders of the residents. And the residents who feel it most are the lower income residents, i.e., the locals - my friends, not the rich New Yorkers. It's gotten to the point where my hometown's city hall has had to strategically buy property just to keep it out of the hands of the church, and the mayor seems to be distancing himself from the Reverend, which had promised a sort of faith-based urban renewal, so to speak. Quite the peccadillo.

Anyway, what with the recent Supreme Court decision which allows towns to take property from private owners and give it to developers in the name of economic development, I wonder if that could be done with Kingdom Life's holdings?

Any thoughts?