Flight 93

Okay I've been noticing any eminent domain issues lately, I wonder why.

Apparently the owners of the land on which Flight 93 crashed are having their land taken away from them by eminent domain. When I first read the tiny little blurb in my newspaper. I was furious. The government has no right to do this. The owners couldn't help that an airplane crashed on their property. This happens frequently enough that the entire country should have tons of homes and farms confiscated if it created a memorial to every crash landing that involved deaths. Okay so this one pulls at people's patriotic heart strings. Still that isn't reason enough to take someone's land away from them.

So I go look it up online and learn that the owner of the land from the very beginning was willing to donate it for a memorial. Huh? Why are there eminent domain issues then? I can't make heads or tails of the article written by Daily American about this whole thing. It seems that the families of Flight 93 are willing to pay 3 times what the appraisal said the land was worth. The government says it is worth $250,000 but then there is this whole issue of all the land surrounding that bit of land. For some reason that wasn't made clear the owner wants all the land to be sold in one block rather than piecemeal.

Now I no longer have anywhere near the sympathy for the land owner as I did. I'm too confused to care if they take his land or not. Why if he was willing to donate it is he now arguing that the appraisal is being kept hidden from him and why is he wanting to sell it all at once? For that matter why in the world does the government need 2,000 acres of land?