Biggest Turn-out Ever for League's Annual Meeting

Over 250 members and guests attended the fourth annual meeting of the League of Kentucky Property Owners on November 4th. We all enjoyed an interesting and informative talk from the Honorable Dr. Ron Paul, Member of Congress from the 14th District of Texas.

During the meeting, League president, william h. adkisson, awarded plaques to past president, Rick Brueggemann, and outgoing board members Bob Schwenke, and Bernie Wessels. We would like to thank these board members for their years of service and dedication to the League. They were instrumental in getting the League started and we appreciate all their efforts.

And now, a word for our meeting sponsors. Thanks to the following corporate sponsors. These companies have supported your League - support them in business if you can.

Keynote Address Sponsor
Bavarian Waste Hauling & Disposal

Hors d'oeuvres Sponsors
Coalition of American Veterans
Colonel Ron Ray - Spokesman
The Drees Company
Economy Meat Market
Greenebaum Doll & McDonald PLLC
Wessels Construction

Program Sponsors
A. L. Baumgartner Construction, Inc.
Kentucky Taxpayers United
Rand Paul - Director
Take Back Kentucky
Norman Davis - Chairman
The Toebben Companies

Confiscate My Property???!!!

I have acquired a recent habit of reminding our elected public officials that they did take an oath of office--that they did swear to uphold the Commonwealth of Kentucky's and the United States Constitutions. One of the Amendments that the U.S. includes is the 5th, "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation".

Still, we hear and read daily, of someone's personal property being taken away from them--figuratively--by prohibiting them from doing anything with it. Remember the snail darter? The spotted owl?

How do we mandate that our public servants, both elected and those acting through the bureaucracies, recognize when any of their actions may be violating our personal property rights? We spell it out in detailed legislation that insists they recognize whenever there is a possibility a violation may occur. We give them specific rules to follow before any law or regulation can be enacted. We see this as the most appropriate and workable method of giving everyone the personal property rights the Constitution envisions.

The logic of legislation guaranteeing these rights seems sacrosanct but it has not been. The League of Kentucky Property Owners, sponsored legislation in 1996, HB255, which would have accomplished this. Enough votes were promised to pass the legislation but some committee legislative chairpersons strangled the bill without a hearing.

SB429, appeared in 1998. We made great progress on this bill. It made it to the Senate floor and passed by a vote of 36-0. It died there for failure to obtain a hearing in the House.

Today, we have prefiled BR420, essentially providing your property with the same securities that the earlier bills did. It has been co-sponsored by several Northern Kentucky legislators. The Home Builders Association of Kentucky has launched their support. We are attempting to obtain the Realtors Association and Kentucky Farm Bureau's backing.

The intentions of the bill, as memorialized in the actual filing, "require state agencies to evaluate proposed government actions regulating the use of private property that may result in a constitutional taking of private property, in order to protect the rights of private property owners and to avoid unnecessary burdens on public treasuries and unwanted interference with private property rights." This means that you can't have my property unless you pay me for it.

Will you ask your legislator to co-sponsor and actively seek passage of BR420? Insist that it get to the floor for a vote? This bill genuinely protects your property rights.

william h. adkisson,
president

Guest Editorial

In response to The Kentucky Post's editorial appearing October 9, 1999...

I'm writing in rebuttal of the editorial entitled "Poor Planning" appearing in the Saturday, October 9th issue of The Kentucky Post. I find myself wanting to send your editorial staff back to history class...or perhaps read them the text of the United States Constitution.

The Post's recent editorial argued that Boone County's Planning Commission "buckled" to property rights advocates because they chose not to spend the time, money and resources I know would be necessary to conduct the requested study for an obviously unconstitutional urban services boundary.

The editorial further went on to say that "zoning, by nature, restricts property rights. Yet zoning is allowed because the entire county benefits from clear rules on how land can be used."

It is in this second statement that the Post's staff may actually have hit on a valid point. Indeed, zoning, by nature, does restrict property rights and it is allowed only because elected officials allow it.

By nature, planning and zoning officials are unelected bureaucrats, even if they don't want to be. Their only checks and balances come from the elected officials that voters hold accountable to defend the Constitution of the greatest country on Earth. And if anyone knows anything about the Constitution, not to mention nearly every other foundational document of this country they know that property rights were explicitly protected as the cornerstones of freedom from tyranny. To know this simple truth, one would merely have to do some research at a local library.

By the Post's staff own admittance in the editorial, they have mistaken their ignorance on the subject for the obviously educated and patriotic actions of the Boone County Planning Commission members.

And for those who feel that the socialist promises of anti-property rights advocates, many of them mischievously labeled as "anti-sprawl" groups, will result in a better place to live-they better think again. Not only are their promises built upon a faulty foundation, but so is their education and evidence. They will not lead us to freedom and independence, but rather to governmental control of our land and rights.

Write your elected officials today and tell them to protect our property rights! After all, they did take an oath to uphold our Constitution.

Editorial by:
Brett Gaspard

Urban Sprawl is No Threat to Ohio's Farmland

The debate over urban sprawl continues. In Ohio, urbanization may account for only 4% of Ohio's cropland loss since 1949. Since little evidence supports farmland preservation efforts, policymakers should attempt to understand changes in farming.

Some in Ohio have identified urban sprawl as a crisis. A bill was signed earlier this year creating a state fund to keep farmland undeveloped. The law also authorized local governments to increase property and sales taxes by public vote to purchase development rights to farmland and open space. Before clamping down on development, however, policymakers should have a clearer understanding of the forces driving farmland trends and the agricultural industry. Ohio farmland loss rates have been falling for decades. The decline rate for the 1990's is only about half of what it was in the 1970's.

Studies have shown that urbanization explains only a small percentage of the decline in cropland. The majority of the cropland loss is attributed to economic and demographic factors. Ohio's agricultural products are stable and in some cases have increased. As agriculture becomes more productive, less land is needed to produce food and other products. In fact, land is generally becoming less important in agricultural production thus freeing up land for other uses.

Development is not the unordered chaos that detractors depict. Farmland conversion reflects the evolving nature of Ohio's communities and the economic realities of the agricultural industry. State and local policy should neither encourage nor discourage these changes.

Agenda 21

Citizens in thousands of urban and rural communities across America are experiencing increasingly harsh regulations supposedly designed to protect some aspect of the environment. Studying the battles throughout the country proves the similarity of many particulars. Local squabbles are manifestations of resistance to the systematic, coordinated implementation of a global, environmental "Master Plan". The cornerstone for that plan is Agenda 21, the United Nation's regulatory vision for our planet for the 21st century.

In the United Nations agreement we read:
"Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced--a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision making at every level."

Although not often perceived locally, the middle class property owners are being taxed and regulated off of their property. Consider that federal, state, and local government ownership of property accounts for over 42 percent of all land in the United States. Ostensibly to protect the environment from rapacious exploitation by private property owners, the Clinton--Gore Administration is expected--through executive orders and other means--to lock up millions more acres as wilderness, national parks, and other designations.

Eager to demonstrate their own "green" bona-fides, the Republicans have responded with bills in the House and Senate which would provide around $1 billion annually for federal purchases of private property. And especially through the Environmental Protection Agency, the Green Gestapo is exerting more and more power.

We must stop this power grab by denying further encroachments by the government envirocrats--federal, state, and local--on private property, and roll back the already dangerous and stifling levels of government ownership and control.

"Let the people have property," observed founding father Noah Webster, "and they will have power that will forever be exerted to prevent the restriction of the press, the abolition of trial by jury, or the abridgment of any other privilege." This was a principle well understood by all of America's Founding Fathers, and also today by the coercive utopians who would steal our freedoms.

Submitted by:
Bernie Kunkel