Little Pink House_ A True Story of Defiance and Courage - Jeff Benedict [43]
Percy asked how they could help her.
“I’m here to find out what’s going on,” she said. “What’s the plan?”
Percy grabbed a pointer and started discussing a municipal-development plan while pointing at different areas on a map. Susette got lost. She knew nursing, not commercial-development lingo. Even the maps were confusing. Rather than using an aerial map or photograph depicting buildings, homes, and landscapes, Percy worked off a plot plan. All Susette recognized was the little square where her house stood at the corner of East and Trumbull streets. But her home was invisible. Maybe that was the point, she thought.
Yet nothing Percy said clarified why the NLDC needed her house.
“Is this for Pfizer?” she asked.
Percy acknowledged that Pfizer would receive some indirect benefits, but he insisted the takings were not directly for Pfizer.
Susette felt his explanation just didn’t add up. Claire had told the newspaper about building space for clinics, along with biotech buildings, around the fort. That would directly benefit Pfizer. “What about eminent domain?” Susette asked.
“The plan is going to benefit the city,” Percy insisted.
“But what about eminent domain?” she repeated.
He conceded that eminent domain remained an option in instances where people refused to sell.
Susette swallowed hard and clasped her hands to prevent them from shaking. She felt powerless. It was as if she hadn’t owned the only home she had ever owned. She finally possessed something she could call her own—and these people were going to snatch it away from her.
They want us out, she thought. They want to frighten us.
Percy emphasized that the plans for the neighborhood were still in the conception stage. Nothing had been finalized or approved.
“If you try to take my property away from me,” she said, “the whole world is going to hear about it.”
Eager to hear how things had gone in her meeting with Percy, Von Winkle stopped by Susette’s house that evening.
“So what happened?”
“They laughed at me.”
“Did they offer you more money?” he asked.
“I told you. They laughed at me.”
Von Winkle asked what she had done about it.
“I told them if they try to take my property from me, the whole world is going to hear about it.”
“Red, you have to be careful. If you keep running your mouth they won’t give you any money.”
He waited for a reply. None came.
“If you try to take Susette’s house,” he joked, “the whole world is going to hear about it.”
The harder Claire worked to accommodate Pfizer, the more Pfizer did to help the NLDC. On June 12, the pharmaceutical company made a no-interest loan to the NLDC for $150,000. It was a pittance compared to what the NLDC had agreed to do for Pfizer. Two weeks later, the NLDC paid $4.75 million for the Calamari junkyard next door to the Pfizer property. The money had come from the Rowland administration. After the NLDC acquired the property, it transferred it all to Pfizer for one dollar.
The scrap yard wasn’t the only property Pfizer had its eye on. Days after the deal closed on the Calamari property, one of Milne’s representatives met with Claire’s top representative to discuss other properties Pfizer hoped the NLDC would help the company acquire. The more Pfizer expanded its land interests, the more Claire resisted the Day’s attempts to access NLDC financial documents and other records. When the newspaper tried sending a reporter to cover an NLDC meeting, the reporter got locked out. The paper responded by filing a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act complaint with the state. Claire had no intention of complying with the request for information. In her view, freedom-of-information laws didn’t apply to the NLDC, because she saw it as a private organization, not a public agency. Never mind that the agency got its funding from a public source. In 1998 alone, the NLDC received or requested nearly $21 million in state funding. And the NLDC’s marching orders came from Rowland’s administration.
The newspaper pressed its case, requesting a formal hearing by the state’s Freedom of Information