CLAY — Onondaga County has acquired the majority of the homes on Burnet Road in the town of Clay in the hopes of attracting a semiconductor manufacturer to the White Pine Commerce Park. But the last few standing on Burnet Road say the county has let its properties fall into disrepair.
A resident group called the Save Burnet Road Coalition has teamed up with the Institute for Justice, which describes itself as a “national public-interest civil liberties law firm dedicated to stopping the abuse of eminent domain.”
The group held a press conference Sept. 14 outside 8668 Burnet Road, one of the houses owned by the county. The front porch had rotted away and collapsed, and the lawn was brown and overgrown.
Chapter 78 of the Clay Town Code prohibits “any growth of brush, grass, or weeds, higher than 10 inches,” so Burnet Road residents have filed code violation complaints with the town of Clay.
While the county arranged for the grass to be cut Sept. 15, according to neighbor Paul Richer, the home at 8668 is far from the only dilapidated property on Burnet Road. Other houses have missing doors, boarded-up windows and wide-open garages, making the neighborhood a target for vandals and burglars.
“The concern from people still living on the road is multiple reports of break-ins just in the last week and a half or so,” said Chad Reese, assistant director of activism with the Institute for Justice. “Folks have recognized cars obviously casing … some of the vacant homes but also some of the homes of people still living there.”
Reese said homeowners are worried about confrontations with looters and vandals.
“If those interactions become violent — because these are folks who are committing crimes — that puts the homeowners that still live on the road at pretty significant risk,” Reese said. “Many of them have also purchased, using their own funds, security cameras. They’ve put up additional gates and that sort of thing to protect their property.”
Richer, who lives with his wife Robin in the home his father built in 1954, said he has spent hundreds of dollars on security cameras.
“We’ve had three incidents in the last two weeks. We haven’t had three incidents in 60 years,” he said of the break-ins.
While Paul and Robin Richer have no intention of budging, Paul Richer said there are only about a dozen residents left on the road.
“Some are waiting for a house to be built so they can move,” he said. “The way the housing market is, it’s hard to find a house that duplicates what you had.”
The Institute for Justice approached Richer and other Burnet Road homeowners in 2021 and helped form the Save Burnet Road Coalition. Reese said IJ is dedicated to making sure eminent domain is used as the Constitution intended: for the public interest, not for private economic development opportunities.
While Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon has said the county is in negotiations with three possible tenants for White Pine, Reese said there is no guarantee the county will be able to secure a large manufacturer for the site.
“Companies do this sort of thing all the time. Many companies already know where they want to set up shop, but then they use different local governments to sort of compete against each other to get their preferred location to provide them a better tax break, for instance, or some other benefit,” Reese said.
Earlier this year, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was offering an undisclosed company “a very robust incentive package” to build a plant at White Pine. Neither Hochul nor McMahon has named any of the companies with whom they are negotiating.
Reese said he doesn’t want Burnet Road to become a “redevelopment wreck” like a neighborhood in the city of New London, Connecticut. IJ represented Susette Kelo and her neighbors in an eminent domain battle with the city in the early 2000s. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for Kelo v. City of New London in 2004. The following year, the court ruled 5-4 that New London’s “proposed disposition of petitioners’ property qualifies as a ‘public use’ within the meaning of the Takings Clause” in the Fifth Amendment.
“What I’m concerned with is that Onondaga County is going the exact same route that the [city] of New London took in the now-infamous Kelo decision,” Reese said. “New London destroyed an entire working-class neighborhood — bulldozed those homes — to make way for a large company to move in, and to this day that former working-class neighborhood is just an empty field because that company was offering empty promises and decided to locate elsewhere.”
McMahon told WAER 88.3 that local first responding agencies — including the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office, SWAT team and fire departments — requested access to vacant Burnet Road properties for training purposes.
“So as part of that, the law enforcement/public safety agencies have agreed to board up any homes. Hopefully, in short order, that won’t be an issue, and we’ll be knocking down those homes with good economic news,” McMahon said.
For the Richers and their remaining neighbors, it’s “just a waiting game” to see if the county can secure a tenant.
“We’re standing firm,” Paul Richer said.
Richer and Reese encouraged other county residents to write their local legislators about the White Pine proposal or to visit saveburnetroad.org to learn more about the residents’ coalition.
