No Land Grab

New London -- The bakery Matthew Dery's great-grandmother opened on Walbach Street at the turn of last century became the cornerstone of the family compound — four houses honeycombed around a driveway where three generations now live in relative self-containment.

The history of the Dery family and its progress from northern Italy to New London is inseparable from these houses. A brick oven survives in the basement of Matthew Dery's house, a vestige of the original bakery. In expanding its settlement in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, the family blasted into the bedrock and then harvested the stone to build another home.

So it is no surprise that the Dery family proved among the hardest to uproot when the New London Development Corp. pegged their neighborhood, in the shadow of a Civil War-era fort near the Thames River, as the future site of a hotel, offices and upmarket rental housing.

Most of the family's 100-odd neighbors sold their properties when the agency came brandishing its plans for a redeveloped waterfront five years ago. The NLDC promptly demolished those houses, but the Derys and six others have spent the

ensuing years in court challenging the NLDC's right to seize their property by eminent domain.

They will get their final appeal on Tuesday, when their attorneys will argue before the U.S. Supreme Court that governments and quasi-public development corporations do not have the right to seize private property not designated as blighted to promote economic development.

The Derys are sympathetic plaintiffs, and legal experts have guessed that their generational ties to their houses might have inspired the high court to revisit the question of how far governments can go in using eminent domain, which it has not done since 1984.

Attorneys for the NLDC will argue that sentimental attachment to a home should not trump the government's right to pursue private developments that will help the public as a whole by creating jobs and boosting the tax revenue that feeds education and public-safety budgets.

“Where do the rights of individuals intersect with the rights of society as a whole?” asked Edward O'Connell, a local attorney who helped craft the NLDC's brief to the high court.

Newspapers these days are full of stories of cities using eminent domain to remove residents and small businesses from property coveted by big-box retailers or other developers, but this is not the story of Fort Trumbull as O'Connell tells it.

When Pfizer announced plans in 1998 to build its global research headquarters on an abandoned factory site close to the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, O'Connell says, the city saw an opportunity to remake its waterfront in a way that would stir economic revival. He emphasizes that the plans for the hotel, housing and offices were cycled through extensive public hearings.

“The city was at a crossroads. It could seize on the opportunity presented by Pfizer's arrival or it could continue to drift along as it had in the past,” O'Connell said. “The question is whether seven people can thwart a plan that was arrived at democratically and which benefits all citizens of New London.”

More than four years have passed since the Fort Trumbull property owners and their attorneys from the Institute for Justice, a libertarian, public-interest law firm, filed suit in December 2000 to prevent the NLDC from invoking eminent domain. The years of litigation have come with consequences for both the agency and the property owners, but on the eve of oral arguments before the high court, both sides say they have no regrets about the very long engagement.

“This has been a great object lesson for my son,” Matthew Dery said of 16-year-old Andy. “There are some battles you have to fight.”

•••

Michael Joplin remembers the excitement that surrounded the first public hearings about the Fort Trumbull redevelopment in 1999. Joplin is now the president of the NLDC, but at the time he was a private investor piqued by the arrival of Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, and

interested in the city he remembered from his childhood as a vibrant regional center.

The NLDC saw the plans to reinvent the neighborhood as a logical outgrowth of the times. Pfizer's announcement that it would build a $294 million facility was a coup for the city, which had long struggled with a weak tax base, a declining population and a downtown filled with empty storefronts. The Fort Trumbull peninsula, adjacent to the Pfizer site and pocked with an industrial hodgepodge that included a scrap-metal yard, oil-tank farm, sewage-treatment plant and a polluted former Navy laboratory, was an obvious target for redevelopment.

“People tend to forget what was there before we started,” O'Connell said.

But there was also a neighborhood on the peninsula, and public opinion fractured over the NLDC's efforts to remove the residents along with the heavy industry. A poll commissioned by The Day earlier this winter showed that only 39 percent of city residents support the practice of seizing private property in pursuit of economic development.

Rob Pero, a Republican who has served on the City Council since the redevelopment plans were approved, thinks the NLDC made various missteps that contributed to waning public confidence in the plan. He said the agency was damaged by its failed plans to renovate three downtown apartment buildings, and it lost further support because of what the public saw as the inordinately large salaries it paid its staff.

The lack of measurable development at Fort Trumbull hasn't helped.

“The general mood of the city was that this was, all in all, a good plan, even if people had qualms about residents being displaced and uprooted,” Pero said. “Then over time, as people didn't see anything being built, they started asking why we went down this road.”

Joplin, the NLDC president, is quick to enumerate the steps his agency has taken to prepare the Fort Trumbull peninsula for development. In addition to removing environmental pollution from roughly 24 acres, the agency rebuilt Howard Street and raised the flood plain in the low-lying coastal area.

“We have cleaned the Aegean stables,” Joplin said. “There has been a productive period of time in the last few years. While the drama in town has been the eminent-domain issue, we were working on other things. Has the case cost us money and time? Absolutely. Have we wasted four years? Absolutely not.”

In spite of the ups and downs that have come with the project, Pero says, the city had little choice but to approve the project in January 2000. He points to the perpetual difficulty in raising tax revenue in a city where half the land is tax-exempt. Until the state allows cities some way to raise money other than the property tax, Pero says, developments like Fort Trumbull are their last best hope.

“If you want us weaned off the state payroll, there are only so many ways of doing that,” Pero said. “Could we have said we're getting Pfizer and then walked away? That would have been short-sighted.”

•••

As Matthew Dery sees it, the pursuit of economic development sounds laudable enough until his family is the one asked to sacrifice its home in the name of the public good.

Sitting in the kitchen of his East Street home, with his cigarettes on the table and his three dogs underfoot, Dery says he has stuck out the fight in court for four years because he could not deprive his parents of the house where they have lived together for 60 years — their anniversary was two weeks ago — and where his mother, Wilhelmina, was born in 1918.

Fort Trumbull had its share of elderly residents when the NLDC slated the area for redevelopment in the late 1990s, and Dery knows a few who died shortly after they chose to relocate rather than fight the plans to redevelop the neighborhood.

“The stress of the episode didn't do them any good,” said Dery, who is the home-delivery sales manager for The Day. “It's not what I want for my parents.”

The forces that have sustained Dery through four years in court are an allegiance to family heritage and the instinct to resist the government that would order him to leave the house his grandmother gave him and his wife, Sue, as a gift when they got engaged in 1984.

Dery talks about the toughness of mind that characterized Fort Trumbull kids when he was growing up: anyone who came to the neighborhood looking for a fight would have to face a line of brothers and friends. The same mentality has helped him to resist the incursions of City Hall.

“No man likes to be told what to do,” Dery said. “It's not about winning or losing, because you lose more if you don't fight than if you fight and lose. You have to fight to get respect. They won't be so quick to pick on you if they're going to get a fight in return.”

Owning a home in a redevelopment zone has both psychological and practical difficulties. When the neighborhood was coming down around them four years ago, Matthew and Sue Dery did not know whether they should continue investing in their house if it was going to become just another pile of rubble.

After this much time, they have returned to the normal rhythms of homeownership. Recently they replaced the carpet in the living room and the floor in the kitchen. Still, they have had trouble obtaining property insurance, because the NLDC has technically held title to their home since the agency filed the condemnation notice in November 2000.

“It was really bad at the beginning, but we've taken our lives back,” Dery said. “We've stopped living under somebody else's mandate.”

The family and the six neighbors who remain will travel to Washington, D.C., this week to hear the oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. Having the chance to make their case in such a solemn setting has been “humbling,” Dery said. He is holding out hope that at least five of the nine justices will sympathize with his family's story.

“This happened to us. We didn't have a choice,” Dery said. “At the end of the day, we can look in the mirror and know we haven't done anything wrong. We were going about our business when this was brought right to us.”