A woman whose family land was taken for Yeager Airport construction should have been able to tell a jury what she thought the land was worth, the Supreme Court said Friday.
Loretta Lynn Gomez had asked for a jury trial and should have gotten one, justices ruled, so she could offer her opinion as to the value of her share of Nutter Farm. The farm was taken by the Kanawha County Commission as a place to store the dirt and debris moved from a hill that towered 200 feet above Yeager's runway.
By removing the hilltop, planes taking off from Yeager wouldn't have to climb as steeply, the ruling states, and therefore, the county commission did take the land for public use.
Private property can constitutionally be taken by eminent domain only for a "public" use and it may only be taken in exchange for payment of "just" compensation, according to the ruling, which Chief Justice Menis Ketchum wrote for the majority.
Eminent domain is the power of the state to take or damage private property for a public purpose upon payment of just compensation. The Legislature's procedure for determining just compensation is called condemnation. In a condemnation proceeding, a circuit judge is charged with determining whether the applicant has a lawful right to take property for the purposes stated in the condemnation petition, the ruling states.
The property may be lawfully taken if an applicant's expressed use of the property is, in fact, a public one, and the condemnation is not impelled by bad faith or arbitrary and capricious motives, justices wrote Friday.
Gomez argued that Kanawha Circuit Judge James Stucky was wrong in finding that the county commission took the farm for public use and that the judge should have let a jury decide the issue.
Justices, though, rejected that argument, writing that the question of public use is always one of law and never left to a jury to decide.
The original owner of the farm, Gomez's father, William McClellan Nutter, died in 2009. Besides Gomez, Nutter's two adult sons, William Watson Nutter and Charles Curtis Nutter, each inherited an undivided one-third interest of the farm.
The land around the farm had already been developed into the Northgate business park, the rulings states. Nutter's two sons sold their shares of the farm to Northgate developer John Wellford in 2012. Each son was paid $58,333, according to the opinion.
Gomez, however, refused to sell her one-third share.
The county commission later purchased the sons' interest in the farm from Wellford, paying him the same amount he paid the Nutters for the property.
On June 14, 2013, the commission filed a condemnation petition against Gomez, seeking to acquire her portion of the property - but at an amount lower than what her brothers received. The condemnation commissioners' report asked for a little more than $33,000 for Gomez' part of the farm.
Stucky was wrong not to grant Gomez a jury trial after she objected to that amount, justices ruled.
Any party may object to a condemnation commissioners report and demand a jury trial within 10 days after the report is filed, the opinion states. The case was sent back to Stucky for further proceedings.
Reach Kate White at kate.white@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1723 or follow @KateLWhite on Twitter.