Should CDOT pay for its 22-year mistake with eminent domain?
“The Colorado Supreme Court recently ruled that for the past 22 years, the Colorado Department of Transportation has unlawfully condemned land for highway widening and improvement projects throughout the state.
But several attorneys familiar with eminent domain law in Colorado don’t think CDOT will ever have to pay for its error, which it committed in 1994 when it improperly shifted the authority to condemn property from its 11-member Transportation Commission to the agency’s chief engineer. CDOT has acquired thousands of properties in that time and condemned hundreds more, including for the $1.67 billion T-REX project 20 years ago or the more recent U.S. 36 managed lanes project.
One attorney who works on eminent domain cases called CDOT’s mistake 22 years ago “an administrative thing”; another lawyer said it was “highly technical”; a third said CDOT could have been challenged anytime in the past two decades and wasn’t. All three doubt that a property owner who was forced to sell to CDOT under an eminent domain action in the past two decades would prevail in court today, whether because of statute of limitations or because damages would be difficult to prove.
“I think it’s pretty unlikely that anyone is going to have a workable case,” said Richard Collins, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder who specializes in the eminent domain arena.”
Aguilar, John. Denver Post 19 November 2016.