Court Opinion

ID: 9527172
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:28:03.560943+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:25:36.458097
License: Public Domain

BARHAM, Justice
(dissenting).
The principal issue before the court is discussed in the five paragraphs appearing in that portion of the majority opinion numbered “III”, and that is the question of whether the taking of these properties has been established to be for a public purpose. I adhere to the reasons given in my original opinion, which concluded that the plaintiff has failed to establish public purpose.
The majority opinion does not come to grips with the problem presented. Plaintiff has constructed, in the middle of miles of 110-KV lines, a short span of 220-KV line on steel towers, a construction which has brought no new or improved service to anyone, for on either side maximum transmission is only 110 kilovolts and there is no source to provide 220 kilovolts of power to this segment. Futhermore, as pointed out in my original opinion, the *933record fails to reflect any plans for future conversion of the remaining 110-KV line to 220 kilovolts. It is obvious, then, that this new segment affords no additional power or service, but is merely a business accommodation, by relocation of an existing line, for a large landholding corporation’s financial benefit.
Therefore there was never, and there is not now, a public need or a public purpose served by the construction at issue. The majority’s conclusion that the demand for electricity had reached the point where existing facilities were taxed to their limit is an erroneous finding of fact both as of the date of trial and even to this date. The plaintiff does in fact serve all the needs along the entire line in question with 110 kilovolts of power, and, I repeat, has presented no plan (except by way of legal argument after trial) for converting any of the lines to actually transmit 220 kilovolts although this small segment has that capacity if the plaintiff would provide the several miles of line necessary to so energize it. The majority’s finding that “engineering art requires the taking plaintiff seeks on defendants’ properties in order to straighten out the line” is contradicted by the very fact that the other extremity of this same short span of line on steel towers is in fact “unduly twisted” by tzvo 90° turns. This, to me, is proof, in and of itself, that the existing line is not engineeringly inartistic, undesirable, unusual, unfeasible, or impractical.
The plaintiff has assumed so many different positions in order to gain judicial approval for its illegal, improper, and abusive use of eminent domain that it appears as multi-appendaged as an octopus. It has embraced and discarded so many arguments that my belief in any of them is destroyed. While I will be the first to protect the right to exercise eminent domain when it serves the public need and purpose, I find the taking in these cases to he an abuse and a perversion of that extraordinary grant of power for the taking of private property.
Rehearing denied.
BARHAM, J., is of the opinion that a rehearing should be granted.