Peoplestown Residents Win New Hearing In Their Fight Against The City
Residents in the Peoplestown neighborhood near the former Turner Field, now Georgia State Stadium, have been fighting Atlanta for years to keep their land. The city says it needs to turn their block into a sewage retention pond and park.
On Wednesday, those residents got some good news. Tanya Washington is one step closer to a re-trial in her case, after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Craig Schwall agreed to schedule a new hearing on new evidence. She’s one of three landowners in litigation over the issue.
Atlanta has been taking over land on her block through eminent domain for a flood management plan. Almost all of the 27 lots on the block have already been acquired by the city.
“The city wants to say, that because they need it we are supposed to just up and leave,” said Bertha Darden, another resident in litigation. “But [they’re] not showing proof of why they need it. And what they’ve presented in court is not good enough.”
A previous ruling was in the city’s favor, but Washington claimed she deserves another chance in court. That’s because, she said, the city released evidence after that first trial that says there’s no engineering support for the project. Specifically, she referred to an email from a city engineer stating the city needed to confirm “engineering validation” before moving forward with the plan.
“It clearly establishes that the city didn’t need to do this project,” she said. “So, maybe they just wanted a pretty park and pond. But you don’t do that at the expense of people, families and communities.”
She said she’s frustrated that it’s taken litigation to find out this information: “If you don’t stand and fight, you never find out things like this. And so my frustration comes from the city being duplicitous, from the city taking advantage of people who may not have the resources or the time or the educational background to fight predatory uses of eminent domain.”
The city declined to comment on the pending litigation but in the hearing, its lawyer argued there was no need to “re-hash” the case and that flooding remains a problem in the neighborhood, which Washington and the Darden dispute.
Jeff Moran is an engineer and consulting on Washington’s legal team. He affirmed that there’s no need for the sewage retention pond anymore: “Peoplestown did have a propensity to flood, but the City took action and appropriate action upstream of the flooding by constructing and designing vaults. And by doing that, they alleviated the flooding at Peoplestown,” he said.
Schwall called Todd Hill and Kimberly Parmer to testify at the new hearing set for Oct. 29. Hill is with the Department of Watershed Management; Parmer is no longer with the city.