$490,000 Settlement – Eminent Domain

$490,000 Settlement

On a highway-widening project in eastern North Carolina, the North Carolina Department of Transportation (DOT) took roughly 4.1 acres of a 50-acre parcel. The property initially had several hundred feet of road frontage, a family home, a rental home, 2 garages, a couple of wells, a buck barn, and a roughly 40-acre farm and 5 access points to a major highway. After the DOT’s taking only one access point on the southern end of the farm remained, and all of the buildings were gone except for the buck barn. The northern field was no longer accessible because the condemnor had put in water drainage that, when combined with an existing ditch, separated the larger northern field from the southern field.

Through front-end negotiation, a Riddle & Brantley attorney was able to convince the DOT to give the property owner another access on the northern end of the field in order to reclaim some of the property’s value. Our team helped the client facilitate the sale of the remaining property for its remaining value to a third party while retaining the rights to the proceeds of the condemnation, which settled at mediation with the DOT in the amount of $490,000.