Property owners are still waiting for payment for land seized through eminent domain while a county government is paying a private attorney $810,000 for litigation that is ongoing in Minnesota. To make matters worse, the attorney’s fee is now 375 percent higher than originally estimated, Watchdog.org reported.
“We just don’t like the way we were treated and as a taxpayer to give that much money to a lawyer, that’s ridiculous,” Carver County property owner Ann Raser told Watchdog.org. “They’d have come out way better just paying people.”
Raser and her husband Tim are among a group of property owners who had land taken for an extension of County Road 11 in the Minneapolis suburbs. The Rasers sued the county after it offered them around $310,000 for nine acres. The two sides eventually settled for $615,000.
“I’ve been telling people and they just can’t even believe it,” Ann Raser said of her case. “Our biggest complaint is, they kept appealing everything. And then their lawyer, they go back and okay another $150,000 for him. We can’t believe it. We’re like, they have an open checkbook for him.”
Raser was referencing private attorney Larry Martin, who could receive up to $810,000 for his work on the case, Watchdog.com reported.
$210,000 becomes $810,000
“It’s understandable, I get it,” Carver County Attorney Mark Metz said. “People look and they see that it costs a tremendous amount of money. Unfortunately, that’s just what it costs to hire a quality private counsel. With the number of these types of cases that we had, the county had to go that route.”
Metz contended that Martin, an expert in eminent domain, was needed because of the complex nature of the case. County commissioners agreed to pay Martin legal fees not to exceed $210,000 in 2012 when the eminent domain case started, but by 2014 they had paid him $450,000.