 It's just a wonderful calm place and you can grow things this is swamp right there You can't drive any more past this road. This is a dead end and I thought I would be left alone here This was the place where I felt the most settled and now I feel the most unsettled British Seraug and her family have lived at the end of Burnett Road on the outskirts of Syracuse, New York for decades Syracuse home and the surrounding lands are now under threat thanks to a combination of federal subsidies and eminent domain a Legal concept that allows the government to forcibly take ownership of their land Our property goes back to to that line of trees Onondaga County has already acquired at least 30 properties on Burnett Road Syracuse neighbors were compensated for their homes, but many sold because they thought they had no other choice When we visited in early October, Syracuse was one of the few remaining holdouts on the street For decades Onondaga County has been trying to develop White Pine Commerce Park Which sits directly adjacent to Syracuse home in the mid-2000s County officials tried to lure an unnamed biotech company to the spot a Decade later it was supposed to become a massive greenhouse Now the county has finally struck a deal It's official Micron is coming to Central New York In October Micron technology one of the world's leading producers of computer chips announced plans for a chip production facility The size of 40 football fields with the promise of creating more than 9,000 jobs in Onondaga County today's announcement As a latest example of my economic plan at work the deal has been hailed by local state and federal politicians and Some of the funding comes from a federal bill championed by Senator Chuck Schumer and signed by President Joe Biden in August With the goal of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US from China. My watch made in America just a slogan It's a reality because of the new law I signed and Chuck designed and delivered We're turning things way around around in a very big way. Yes folks This is our eerie canal moment Schumer compared the Micron factory to the Grand Public Works project that in the 1820s connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean That's what turned upstate New York into an international manufacturing hub This is the largest private investment in New York history. We are gathered here as a result of an Exclusive almost never happened an extraordinary unprecedented collaboration to be able to close on a deal which will be known as the investment of the century The head of the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency has said that the semiconductor plant will turn Syracuse into the next Austin, Texas Everyone in this community will benefit everyone Just before the holidays They they send a letter in a mail that they wanted to purchase our property Paul Richard is the co-owner of the Hot House Brewery in nearby Cicero, New York And one of the few remaining residents of Burnett Road. My grandfather moved here on the road in 1940 This is our home. My dad built it in 1954. I was born in 58 So I've been on this road my entire life My wife's also lived on this road her entire life as well. Her family's been here since 1850 We have two kids two daughters two grandchildren It was it was devastating. My heart really sank when they wanted to come after our property and our home Eminent domain is typically used to make way for public works projects like roads sewers and schools But this isn't the first time that a county or municipality has used this process to transfer land from one private entity to another In the mid 1990s the city of New London, Connecticut used eminent domain to take possession of more than a dozen properties Including homes businesses and churches so that the land could be redeveloped into a fiser pharmaceuticals corporate headquarters and office park The plan was to turn over an entire neighborhood to a city economic development corporation That would then give it to fiser to build its factory with of course promises of new jobs and businesses that would resurrect New london another depressed former industrial town I won't leave the battle between the city and the community culminated in the supreme court's kilo versus new london decision in 2005 Kilo is one of the most reviled opinions that the supreme court has ever handed down Robert Belden is an attorney with the institute for justice a libertarian legal nonprofit that famously defended a property owner named Suzette kilo from the same threat that british surrogh and paul richard now face The legal battle over new london's attempt to seize kilo's little pink house was later turned into a feature film The best course for us to improve our city would be to acquire all the homes There was a five to four decision drafted by justice stevens That basically says as long as a government is creative enough to Come up with a public use or a public purpose It can take a private person's property and hand it over to another private person In her dissenting opinion, then justice sandredeo connor warned that the fallout from this decision will not be random The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process Including large corporations and development firms A lot of people have sold because because of the threat of eminent domain. They don't you know, it's really Very difficult to fight and they don't want to lose their property To that they feel they don't have any choice Throughout the process onondaga county has insisted that eminent domain will only be used as a last resort It's not a fair negotiation to our clients when they are Faced with the threat of eminent domain if they don't agree to sell their home voluntarily The oral argument for kilo actually talked about this whether there were Voluntary purchases by the city of new london and it drew a laugh from everybody in the chain chamber when the uh The city's government said oh a lot of property owners have voluntarily sold to the city I mean everybody knows that once you put this threat out there, you're no longer operating on an equal plane Manufacturing employment has been steadily declining in upstate new york since the 1960s And the micron factory is one of thousands of attempts large and small to revitalize the region with government subsidies A 2017 investigation by pro-publica, columbia university's journalism school and the investigative post combed through 16,000 subsidy deals worth billions of dollars handed out over the course of four years under the oversight of former governor andre kwomo It found that the recipients were poorly vetted that the awards yielded only modest results and that the process lacked transparency yahoo was one of the biggest award recipients getting $470 million between 2009 and 2013 for a data center near buffalo At the time senator schumer said that this opening says to high tech companies throughout the world See what stuff we have and you will come here to In the years that followed yahoo laid off thousands of employees by 2015 the project had created 200 jobs at a cost of about 2.4 million dollars each By 2017 after having been valued at over 100 billion dollars yahoo was bought by verizon for a fraction of that amount And by 2018 one of the developers in the buffalo project was in prison for corruption connected to the deal Today senator schumer is once again the driving force behind the micron deal It's why i worked so long and so hard And so persistently for the last three years to author and pass the chips and science bill This project will fundamentally transform the region into a new global hub for innovation and high tech jobs Schumer's office did not respond to reasons requests for an interview folks We're here to celebrate one of the most significant investments in american history again not hyperbole The county originally estimated that development of the white pine site into a semiconductor factory would create 4 000 jobs Now micron says it will create 9 000 jobs Even if the company makes good on that promise new york's $5.5 billion in economic incentives will work out to over 600 000 dollars per job created They throw a number out every time i think when they hit a dart a dart board that that's where their number comes from In my opinion, uh, the state isn't very business friendly There's a lot of regulations in the state and i don't find that attractive to a big company I just feel that if a big company does come in here, uh, how long are they going to stay? You know when their benefits package Expires and they have to start paying taxes are they going to stay or they're going to move out of state? Like all the other big businesses around here and companies have done In the past and micron's ceo has indicated that the company will expect ongoing financial support from the state of new york To achieve its promised job creation targets They're the biggest in the world. They're coming into wisconsin with an Unbelievable plant like we've never seen before The micron project has a lot in common with another eminent domain project that also relied on government subsidies A foxconn factory on the outskirts of milwaukey wisconsin that was supposed to manufacture components for apple's iphone Then governor scott walker gave foxconn one of the most lucrative corporate welfare packages in american history Trump promised that it would be the eighth wonder of the world Developers bulldozed 75 homes to make way for the factory When reason covered the story in 2018 kim and jim mahogany were one of the only families left within one and a half square miles Fighting with the government to hold on to their property the mahogany's unlike their neighbors managed to stay put Last year foxconn announced that it was scaling down the project significantly Today the mahogany's home overlooks an unfinished construction site The residents of bernett road are trying to avoid a similar fate the county Raised the specter of eminent domain in august 2021 But they don't actually initiate the eminent domain process until they send formal notice And they're really not obligated to do that until they're ready to do it So what you have happen is this sort of natural I don't want to use prisoners dilemma But sort of game theory among the property owners in this neighborhood Do you want to be the last holdout who? You know doesn't get the price that your neighbors got you want to be the first person to sell So that you can avoid what has happened on bernett road now Which is that the government takes some of the properties you live nearby and lets them become dilapidated and nuisances to the remaining properties It is certainly just sort of a sort of damically is almost hanging over everybody's head The county has forced people out of their house They they didn't move by choice. They really had no intention of moving Everybody that was down here loved it here And they wanted this to be their forever home A few weeks after we visited paul he and his wife made the difficult decision to accept an offer from the county It's hard to duplicate what I have here. We've looked around Like I said when we were negotiating with the county, we were looking at properties. We were online Wondering where we can go where we can find something that duplicates what we have here I won't say there's nothing out there like this, but it's very difficult to find I mean just to have the same kind of neighbors that watch out for each other that Are friends. I mean when there's a funeral on the road somebody dies on the road everybody's on the road is At the funeral at the wake Most of the homes on the street are vacant Some have been stripped of their garage doors lighting fixtures copper pipes and anything else that the homeowners could sell Others have been raided by looters Sarag has put up security cameras to deter crime something. She says she didn't used to worry about there was a real good community here Rini's still one of the people who at the end of the road. She still comes down here walks her dog and starts crying Even if the county succeeds in clearing out barnett road There's no guarantee that biden schumer and hulkles grand vision to return syracuse to its former glory Or even to build the manufacturing facility that they're promising will become a reality After the 2005 kilo decision fiser announced that it was pulling out of the project in new london and the land was left vacant Earlier this year the city finally approved a new development to occupy the spot where susette kilo and her neighbors homes once stood consisting of a hotel and ironically new housing The kilo decision sparked so much outrage that a majority of states passed new laws to constrain the use of eminent domain for private purposes new york state however did not It's something we want to change, you know for everybody in new york not just for us I mean i got kids i got grandkids is something like this going to happen to them down the road And you know we hear about them saying that they're going to take our property Kind of thing they're threatening with eminent domain I just don't want them to go through that stress that we're going through Our children and our grandchildren will benefit from what we announced today With jobs and a future we could never imagine If i'm forced to move out then you know, I I don't think it's fair It's you know taking somebody's private land and giving it to another private company Is that the government's place? You know, I don't think so