It's just a wonderful, calm place.
And you can grow things.
There's a swamp right there.
You can't drive anymore
past this road.
This is a dead end.
And I thought I would be left
alone here.
This was the place where I felt the
most settled.
And now I feel the most unsettled.
Britta Serog and her family have
lived at the end of Burnet Road on
the outskirts of Syracuse, New York,
for decades.
Serog's home and the surrounding
lands are now under threat, thanks
to a combination of federal
subsidies and eminent domain,
a legal concept that allows the
government to forcibly take
ownership of their land.
Our property goes back to
that line of trees.
Onondaga County has already acquired
at least 30 properties on Burnet
Road.
Serog's neighbors were compensated
for their homes, but many sold
because they thought they had no
other choice.
When we visited in early October,
Serog was one of the few remaining
holdouts on the street.
For decades, Onondaga County has
been trying to develop White Pine
Commerce Park, which sits directly
adjacent to Serog's home.
In the mid 2000, county officials
tried to lure an unnamed biotech
company to the spot.
A decade later, it was supposed to
become a massive greenhouse.
Now the county has finally struck a
deal.
It's official.
Micron is coming to
central New York.
In October, Micron Technology,
one of the world's leading producers
of computer chips, announced plans
for a chip production facility the
size of 40 football fields
with the promise of creating more
than 9000 jobs in Onondaga County.
Today's announcement
is the latest example of my economic
plan at work.
The deal has been hailed by local,
state and federal politicians,
and some of the funding comes from a
federal bill championed by Senator
Chuck Schumer and signed by
President Joe Biden in August with
the goal of bringing manufacturing
jobs back to the U.S.
from China.
My watch, Made in America is just a
just a slogan.
It's a reality because of the
new law I signed and Chuck
designed and delivered.
We're turning things way around.
Around in a very big way.
Yes, folks, this
is our Erie Canal moment.
Schumer compared the Micron factory
to the Grand Public Works project
that in the 1820s connected the
Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.
That's what turned upstate New York
into an international manufacturing
hub.
This is the largest
private investment in New York
history.
We are gathered here as a result
of an exclusive, almost
never happening, extraordinary,
unprecedented collaboration
to be able to close on a deal which
would be known as the
investment of the century.
The head of the Onondaga County
Industrial Development Agency has
said that the semiconductor plant
will turn Syracuse into the next
Austin, Texas.
Everyone in this community will
benefit everyone.
Just before the holidays 2019,
they sent a letter in the mail that
they wanted to purchase our
property.
Paul Richer is the co-owner of the
Hot House Brewery in nearby Cicerco,
New York, and one of the few
remaining residents of Burnet Road.
My grandfather moved here on the
road in 1940.
This is our home.
My dad built it in 1954.
I was born in 58, so I've been on
this road my entire life.
My wife's also lived on this road
her entire life as well.
Her family's been here since 1850.
We have two kids, two daughters,
two grandchildren.
There was it was devastating.
My heart really sank when
they wanted to come after our
property and our home.
Eminent domain is typically used to
make way for public works projects
like roads, sewers and schools.
But this isn't the first time that a
county or municipality has used this
process to transfer land from one
private entity to another.
In the mid 1990s, the city of
New London, Connecticut, used
eminent domain to take possession of
more than a dozen properties,
including homes, businesses and
churches, so that the land could be
redeveloped into a Pfizer
Pharmaceuticals corporate
headquarters and office park.
The plan was to turn over an entire
neighborhood to a city economic
development corporation that would
then give it to Pfizer to build its
factory.
With, of course, promises of new
jobs and businesses that would
resurrect New London, another
depressed former industrial town.
I won't leave.
The battle between the city and the
community culminated in the Supreme
Court's Kelo versus New London
decision in 2005.
Kelo is one of the most
reviled opinions that the
Supreme Court has ever handed down.
Robert Belden is an attorney with
the Institute for Justice, a
libertarian legal nonprofit that
famously defended a property owner
named Susette Kelo from the same
threat that Britta Serog and Paul
Richer now face.
The legal battle over New London's
attempt to seize Kelo's little
pink house was later turned
into a feature film.
The best course for us to improve
our city would be to acquire all the
homes.
My God.
Oh, my God.
That was a 5 to 4 decision drafted
by Justice Stevens that basically
says as long as a government
is creative enough to
come up with a public use or a
public purpose, it can take
a private person's property
and hand it over to another private
person.
In her dissenting opinion, then
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor warned
that the fallout from this decision
will not be random.
The beneficiaries are likely to be
those citizens with disproportionate
influence and power in the political
process, including large
corporations and development firms.
A lot of people have sold because
because of the threat of eminent
domain, they don't you know, it's
really very difficult to
fight and they don't want to lose
their property to that.
They feel they don't have any
choice.
Throughout the process, Onondaga
County has insisted that eminent
domain will only be used as
a last resort.
It's not a fair negotiation to our
clients when they are faced with
the threat of eminent domain if
they don't agree to sell their home
voluntarily.
The oral argument for Kelo actually
talked about this, whether there
were voluntary purchases
by the city of New London, and it
drew a laugh from everybody
in the chain chamber when the
city's government said, Oh, a lot
of property owners have voluntarily
sold to the city.
I mean, everybody knows
that once you put this threat
out there, you're no longer
operating on an equal plane.
Manufacturing employment has been
steadily declining in upstate New
York since the 1960s, and the
Micron factory is one of thousands
of attempts, large and small, to
revitalize the region with
government subsidies.
A 2017 investigation by ProPublica,
Columbia University's Journalism
School and the Investigative Post
combed through 16,000
subsidy deals worth billions of
dollars handed out over the course
of four years under the oversight
of former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
It found that the recipients were
poorly vetted, that the awards
yielded only modest results, and
that the process lacked
transparency.
Yahoo was one of the biggest award
recipients getting $470 million
between 2009 and 2013
for a datacenter near Buffalo.
At the time, Senator Schumer said
that this opening says the high tech
companies throughout the world.
See what stuff we have and you
will come here, too.
In the years that followed, Yahoo!
Laid off thousands of employees.
By 2015, the project had created 200
jobs at a cost of about $2.4
million each.
By 2017, after having been valued
at over $100 billion,
Yahoo! Was bought by Verizon for
a fraction of that amount.
And by 2018, one of the developers
in the Buffalo Project was in prison
for corruption connected to the
deal.
Today, Senator Schumer is once again
the driving force behind the Micron
deal.
It's why I worked so long and so
hard and so persistently
for the last three years to author
and pass the Chips and Science
Bill. This project will
fundamentally transform the region
into a new global hub for innovation
and high tech jobs.
Schumer's office did not respond to
Reason's requests for an interview.
Folks, we're here to celebrate one
of the most significant investments
in American history.
Again, not hyperbole.
The county originally estimated that
development of the White Pine site
into a semiconductor factory would
create 4000 jobs.
Now, Micron says it will create 9000
jobs, even if the company makes
good on that promise.
New York's $5.5 billion
in economic incentives will work out
to over $600,000
per job created.
They throw a number out every time I
take when they hit a dark dartboard.
That's where their number comes
from.
In my opinion, the state isn't
very business friendly.
There's a lot of regulations in the
state and I don't find that
attractive to a big company.
I just feel that if a big company
does come in here, how long
are they going to stay in?
When their benefits package
expires and they have to start
paying taxes, are they going to stay
or are they going to move out of state
like all the other big businesses
around here and companies have done
in the past?
And Micron's CEO has indicated
that the company will expect ongoing
financial support from the state of
New York to achieve its promised
job creation targets.
They're the biggest in the world.
They're coming into Wisconsin with
an unbelievable plant
like we've never seen before.
The Micron Project has a lot in
common with another eminent domain
project that also relied on
government subsidies.
A Foxconn factory on the outskirts
of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that was
supposed to manufacture components
for Apple's iPhones.
Then Governor Scott Walker gave
Foxconn one of the most lucrative
corporate welfare packages in
American history.
Trump promised that it would be the
eighth wonder of the world.
Developers bulldozed 75
homes to make way for the factory.
When Reason covered the story in
2018, Kim and Jim Mahoney
were one of the only families left
within one and a half square miles,
fighting with the government to hold
on to their property.
The Mahoney's, unlike their
neighbors, managed to stay put.
Last year, Foxconn announced that it
was scaling down the project
significantly.
Today, the Mahoney home overlooks an
unfinished construction site.
The residents of Burnet Road are
trying to avoid a similar fate.
The county raised
the specter of eminent domain in
August 2021, but
they don't actually initiate
the eminent domain process until
they send formal notice,
and they're really not obligated
to do that until they're ready to
do it. So what you have happened is
this sort of natural
I don't want to use prisoner's
dilemma, but sort of game theory
among the property owners in
this neighborhood.
Do you want to be the last holdout
who, you know, doesn't
get the price that your neighbors
got? You want to be the first person
to sell so that you can avoid
what has happened on Burnet Road
now, which is that the government
takes some of the properties you
live nearby and lets them become
dilapidated and nuisances
to the remaining properties.
It is certainly just sort of a
sword of Damocles almost hanging
over everybody's head.
The county has forced people
out of their house.
They didn't move by choice.
They really had no intention of
moving.
Everybody that was down here loved
it here.
And they wanted this to be their
forever home.
A few weeks after we visited Paul,
he and his wife made the difficult
decision to accept an offer from the
county.
It's hard to duplicate what I have
here. We've looked around.
Like I said, when we were
negotiating with the county, we were
looking at properties.
We were online wondering
where we can go, where we can find
something that duplicates what we
have here.
I won't say there's nothing out
there like this, but it's very
difficult to find.
I mean, just to have the same kind
of neighbors that watch out for each
other or friends.
I mean, when there's a funeral on
the road, somebody dies on the road.
Everybody on the road is
at the funeral at the wake.
Most of the homes on the street are
vacant. Some have been stripped of
their garage doors, lighting
fixtures, copper pipes and anything
else that the homeowners could sell.
Others have been raided by looters.
Serog has put up security cameras to
deter crime, something she says she
didn't used to worry about.
There was a real good community
here.
Renee, still one of the people who
at the end of the road, she still
comes down here, walks her dog and
starts crying.
Even if the county succeeds in
clearing out Burnet Road.
There's no guarantee that Biden,
Schumer and Hochul grand vision
to return Syracuse to its former
glory or even to build
the manufacturing facility that
they're promising will become a
reality.
After the 2005 Kelo decision,
Pfizer announced that it was pulling
out of the project in New London and
the land was left vacant.
Earlier this year, the city finally
approved a new development to occupy
the spot where Susette Kelo and her
neighbors homes once stood,
consisting of a hotel and
ironically, new housing.
The Kelo decision sparked so much
outrage that a majority of states
passed new laws to constrain the use
of eminent domain for private
purposes.
New York State, however, did not.
It's something we want to change,
you know, for everybody in New York,
not just for us.
I mean, I've got kids, I've got
grandkids.
There's something like this going to
happen to them down the road.
And, you know, we hear about them
saying that they're going to take
our property kind of thing.
They're threatening with them on the
mainland.
I just don't want them to go through
that stress that we're going
through.
Our children and our grandchildren
will benefit from what we
announced today with jobs
and a future we could never
imagine.
If I'm forced to move out, then, you
know, I don't think it's fair.
It's, you know, taking somebody's
private land and giving it to
another private company.
Is that the government's place?
You know, I don't think so.