A federal judge in Rhode Island handed property owners a rare and useful win last week, and the reasoning behind it deserves more attention than the case has gotten. In SCLS Realty, LLC v. Town of Johnston, Judge Melissa R. DuBose ruled that Johnston’s seizure of a 31-acre parcel off George Waterman Road was void from the start, because the town never had the legal authority to take the property the way it did.
The facts read like a checklist of what not to do. The Santoro family, through SCLS Realty and a related entity, planned a 252-unit affordable housing complex on the site under a 2023 Rhode Island law designed to encourage exactly that kind of project. Johnston Mayor Joseph Polisena Jr. opposed it and, according to Reason, promised to use every power of government available to stop it. The town then invented its own condemnation process, claimed the land for a municipal complex, transferred title to itself, and deposited compensation with a state court, all without telling the property owners any of this was happening. They found out from a social media post.
That sequence alone tells you something about how the town viewed the rules. But DuBose’s ruling didn’t turn on the secrecy. It turned on authority. Johnston argued its home-rule charter let it condemn property for “town purposes,” full stop. DuBose wasn’t having it. A municipality, she wrote, isn’t a sovereign in its own right, and eminent domain is an inherent attribute of sovereignty that a town may exercise only to the extent the state legislature has actually delegated it. Rhode Island’s statutory scheme requires more than a general-purpose clause. It requires the town to pledge its faith and credit for just compensation, specify how that compensation gets paid, and follow enforcement procedures the legislature actually wrote down. Johnston’s charter did none of that. The town, in DuBose’s words, “did not do so here.”
I spend my professional life around fiduciary duty, and this case is a fiduciary case wearing a land-use costume. Having the authority to act and following the procedure that makes the action lawful are two different things, and an institutional trustee who conflates them finds that out the hard way, usually in front of a judge. Johnston’s mayor apparently believed that broad charter language was itself the procedure. It wasn’t. It was a permission slip with none of the required signatures.
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Property rights advocates are understandably pleased. Pacific Legal Foundation represented the Santoro family, and attorney Kady Valois called the ruling a check on the town’s abuse of power. She’s not wrong, but the win is narrower than it might sound. DuBose explicitly declined to hold that Johnston can never use eminent domain here, and the ruling doesn’t reach the harder question of whether blocking an affordable housing project counts as pretext rather than genuine public use. Five other claims in the case, including that pretext question, are still working through discovery. Johnston has since floated creating a Municipal Public Building Authority as a fix, and the property owners have already accused the town of violating the standing injunction in the meantime.
Still, the template here travels. Any property owner facing a municipality that leans on broad home-rule language instead of specific statutory delegation has a road map: check whether the legislature actually authorized this particular exercise of eminent domain, whether the compensation mechanism is real and enforceable, and whether the town followed every procedural box the statute requires. Charters grant power. They don’t excuse a town from proving it followed the rules for using it.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.