The owners of a hardware store chain who sued the Town of Southold in 2020 for seizing their land in Mattituck under eminent domain exhausted their legal options this week when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review their case.
The high court’s decision effectively upheld a Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2-1 decision, which found that Southold Town’s use of eminent domain to seize the Brinkmann’s 1.75-acre property at the corner of Main Road and New Suffolk Avenue for a town park was legal.
The Brinkmann family owns a chain of hardware stores on Long Island and were planning to build a 20,000-square-foot hardware store and an 8,000-square-foot paint store on the commercially-zoned property. Brothers Ben and Hank Brinkmann took over a business that their parents had started in 1976.
“The court’s decision is a disappointment but our decision to bring this case to court was still the right thing to do,” the brothers said in a statement. “Government shouldn’t be able to get away with these abuses of power and shining a light on them like we did with the help of [the non-profit Institute of Justice] will continue to build public support so that one day no one will have to go through what we have.”
Eminent domain gives government entities the power to seize private land for public purposes, in return for compensation. Both Central Park and the Hoover Dam benefited from the use of eminent domain to acquire private property for public use.
“Every petition to the Supreme Court is a long shot because the court only takes a few dozen cases each year, out of thousands,” said Jeff Redfern — a senior attorney at the public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, which represented the Brinkmanns pro bono — said in the statement.
The Brinkmann family, which owns five other hardware stores on Long Island, bought the land for $700,000 in 2016 to build a new store. The proposed project was halted by a series of building moratoriums that began in 2019. In 2020, the town voted to initiate an eminent domain proceeding.
The Brinkmann’s have argued that the town failed to purchase the land when it was on sale in 2011 and again in 2016. The family believes the town used eminent domain simply because they didn’t want the property developed, and didn’t have previous plans to develop a park on the site.
In 2021, they sued Southold Town in federal court, but in the fall of 2022, the judge dismissed the Brinkmann’s case.
U.S. District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall wrote in his ruling that the Brinkmanns do not allege their property was taken for private benefit; that the Town Board failed to follow state law; or that a public park does not constitute a public use.
The judge also highlighted flaws in precedents used to support the Brinkmanns’ case and dismissed an argument that “requiring a plaintiff to plead a private benefit here would allow the government to use eminent domain to punish political opponents or unpopular minorities.”
Judge Hall also concluded that the plaintiffs’ lack of knowledge about the town’s plans to a build a park, and a statement from former Town Supervisor Scott Russell that nothing would be built on the property, “do not amount to anything more than the Town’s desire to leave the plot undeveloped” and “do not support an inference of a nefarious, improper motive necessitating ‘closer objective scrutiny.’”