The Editor's Desk

Over at Reason, one of the litigators for the now-famous eminent domain Supreme Court decision describes what has happened three years after the court ruling.

The house at the center of the case has been moved. And the project that the city used to justify taking it under eminent domain practices … is pretty much dead.

You know, that’s another argument against eminent domain abuse that didn’t even occur to me. Private projects and developments change all the time. Sometimes they die entirely. Keeping eminent domain confined to an identifiable public need — like a courthouse or school — doesn’t guarantee a project’s completion, but it is certainly more likely than a huge complicated private development.

Imagine if the City of Barstow had used eminent domain to get the land for one of these proposed housing developments that haven’t and maybe won’t come to pass. People forced to move and buildings bulldozed. And then, the developers don’t have enough money or can’t actually complete the project.

That’s something to keep in mind when a municipality defends its eminent domain abuse for economic development projects. There’s absolutely no way of truly knowing whether the project will ever come to fruition.

My staff is cheating!

You may or may not have noticed some slight changes to the way the current Desert Dispatch looks. As we’ve been putting together the various elements and features that we’ll be using in the redesigned newspaper, they’ve been quietly showing up in the current version. A couple of new items — a stat file display and a “Did you know?” box — were used in Saturday’s paper.

We’ve started practicing designing the new pages to see how much work it will be once the redesign launches in July.

Just to make things clear, though, the redesign is actually fairly modest. We’re not really changing our content that much. We hope to make it easier to find important information and details in the way we present the news so that busy readers can quickly get what they need.