The Fifth Amendment has long stood in the way of the schemes of public officials. Since the early days of the republic, federal, state and local governments have felt the need to acquire the private property of citizens. This has spawned almost two centuries of eminent domain case law and precedent requiring reasonable grounds and just compensation for private land acquisitions.
Inevitably, there has been a long arms race between essurious public servants and the people. Over the past 50 years, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has pioneered a litany of highly contested but thus far effective "workarounds" for the deprivation of citizens' private property rights.
Recently, the EPA has unilaterally interpreted environmental regulations to designate any land near water as "wetlands" and thus decree that owners have no right to drain, build on, or improve their land. Affected landowners are left without compensation for the market diminution of their property values. (Woe to those with a soggy front lawn!)
Assiduous readers can easily research the legal and judicial morass that this bureaucratic overreach has led to so that new techniques have sprung up widely to effect the same purposes. A few weeks ago, it came to our attention that the U.S. Forest Service (an agency of the U.S. Department Of Agriculture) has found a new method of displacing defenseless homeowners.
The state of Florida is home to innumerable lakes and freshwater springs. One such thriving community of approximately 8,000 residents and scores of retail businesses catering to the tourist trade is the somewhat misleadingly named Salt Springs, near Ocala, in North-Central Florida.
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