The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently rendered a decision in Reading Area Water Authority v. Schuylkill River Greenway Association, 100 A.3d 572 (Pa. 2014), further narrowing the definition of what constitutes a “public purpose” for a taking by eminent domain in Pennsylvania. The Reading opinion is significant, as it constitutes yet another Pennsylvania decision favoring the protection of private property rights from seizure by the government. The decision is particularly noteworthy in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial expansive view of the eminent domain power in Kelo v. City of New London, 454 U.S. 469, from 2005.
Kelo involved a city’s use of its eminent domain power to take privately owned property to enable its redevelopment by a private developer, who proposed a higher-yielding economic use for the property. In Kelo, the Supreme Court held in a divided 5-4 opinion that such economic development projects can qualify as a “public purpose” under the “public use” provision of the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, even where private enterprise drives the development—state and local governments can, for the purpose of improving the community, seize private property via eminent domain to enable private development.
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