Leadership Quote by Solomon Ortiz

Ortiz is threading a political needle that only exists because eminent domain sits at the fault line between civic necessity and private security. He opens by granting the classic, broadly popular justification: the state can take property for projects people recognize as undeniably public - roads, schools, utilities. That concession isn’t softness; it’s inoculation. By affirming constitutional legitimacy up front, he positions himself as a rule-of-law Democrat, not an anti-government crusader, then pivots to draw a bright line where the public starts to look like a pretext.

The phrase “solely to implement economic development plans” is doing the real work. “Economic development” is the kind of bureaucratic perfume that can make displacement sound like progress. Ortiz treats it as a downgrade from “public good” to a speculative promise: higher tax revenue, shinier storefronts, maybe jobs - benefits that are diffuse, contested, and often captured by developers with the right connections. The subtext is a warning about who actually gets to define “good” when city halls chase growth: not the homeowners being condemned, but the coalition of planners, financiers, and electeds who can rebrand private gain as communal destiny.

The context is the post-Kelo era, when the Supreme Court’s broad reading of “public use” triggered bipartisan backlash. Ortiz is tapping that outrage while keeping faith with government’s legitimate tools. It’s a calibrated moral claim: if “public good” can mean whatever an economic plan says it means, then property rights become conditional on political fashion - and the people with the least leverage pay first.