Flutterby™! : Eminent Domain

The Longmont City Council is invoking eminent domain over the Dillards store in the Twin Peaks Mall. If you've never been to Longmont (and I assume you've never been to Twin Peaks Mall), you should know that Twin Peaks Mall is not a place that anybody goes to shop. When I moved to Colorado seven years ago, most of the mall was empty. Since then even the Sears anchor closed. There's an Old Country Buffet that seems to be popular with the older folks and a movie theater that gets a lot of traffic from kids (but the cameras are always out of focus, so I've only gone a couple times despite being about 1 mile from my house versus 12 miles for the next closest theater).

Evidently Dillards is unique in that it owns it's building independent of the rest of the mall, which sold to developers last year for an insanely small amount of money. Dillards also has veto rights over just about any reconstruction on the mall. The developer has offered Dillards a couple really sweet deals to either allow the redevelopment or sell out. But Dillards keeps holding to it's guns demanding a price more than half what the developer paid for the entire mall and almost double the most recent appraisal. Crazy...