Judge Voids Johnston's Seizure of Housing Site

On July 28, a federal judge in Providence declared that the Town of Johnston's seizure of 31 acres on George Waterman Road — land a family of builders had spent the better part of two years trying to turn into 252 income-restricted apartments — was "constitutionally deficient" and "void from its inception," which is the legal system's way of saying the taking never happened at all.

U.S. District Judge Melissa R. DuBose did not rule that Johnston lacks the power of eminent domain. She ruled the town skipped the steps that give that power legitimacy. "When a municipality elects to invoke the power of eminent domain, it must proceed in the manner prescribed by law, and the Town did not do so here," DuBose wrote in her decision in SCLS Realty, LLC v. Town of Johnston — power and process, as she put it, go hand in hand. The town leaned on its home rule charter as the sole authority for the condemnation, and the charter, the court found, could not carry that weight: Johnston acted without pledging the public faith and credit to guarantee just compensation and without establishing clear enforcement procedures.

The chronology is the case. The Santoro and Compagnone families have owned the George Waterman Road parcel since the 1980s. In October 2024 they filed a preliminary land-use application for a 252-unit, five-building, one hundred percent low- and moderate-income complex — a project shaped to fit the density bonus the General Assembly created in 2023, which allows up to 12 units per acre on sewered parcels when every unit is deed-restricted affordable, and which limits a town's ability to say no where less than 10 percent of its housing stock qualifies. Johnston's share sits at roughly 7.9 percent. The planning board set a hearing for December 3, 2024. That same day, Mayor Joseph Polisena Jr. published a letter opposing the development and vowing to fight back with "all the power of government" available to him.

Seven weeks later, on January 27, 2025, Polisena announced the town would take the land by eminent domain for a municipal campus — town hall, police, fire. The council voted 5-0 the next night. The Attorney General's office subsequently found that vote violated the Open Meetings Act for insufficient notice and directed a re-vote, a sequence Uprise RI documented in April 2025. On March 10, 2025, after an appraisal valuing the property at $775,000, the council voted 5-0 again. The owners sued in federal court that night. Two days later the town recorded documents transferring title to itself — without telling the family or its lawyers. Judge DuBose issued a temporary restraining order within days and put the land back in the owners' hands, where it has remained.

To be sure, Johnston's stated need is not frivolous on its face. The mayor's office has described a fire station with no fire alarm system, a leaking roof and no bathrooms or showers for female firefighters, and a police station with no hot water, no toilets in the locker rooms and a basement that floods in heavy rain. Those conditions have not been independently inspected or verified in the record, and the property owners argue the municipal campus rationale surfaced only after the housing application did — the town had never previously proposed relocating its government services from the center of town to its edge.

Polisena is not conceding. "On page one of the decision, the Court states that it 'does not question the exercise of that authority,' thereby acknowledging the Town of Johnston's power to exercise eminent domain," the mayor said in a statement. "The Town will follow the Court's guidance regarding the proper procedure moving forward." That is not bluster: other Rhode Island statutes, including the Municipal Public Buildings Authority Law, expressly provide mechanisms for a municipality to take land for public buildings, and nothing in DuBose's ruling forecloses a properly executed attempt down that road.

Nor does the ruling end the litigation. It resolved one of six counts filed in March 2025. The remaining claims — and discovery, and depositions of the officials who ran this play — now go forward.

For every other city and town watching from the sidelines, the lesson is narrow but sharp. A municipality that dislikes a housing project the state has told it to permit cannot simply cook up a bespoke condemnation process, record a deed to itself in the dark, and call the matter closed. Johnston tried to serve that dish anyway, and the federal court sent it back to the kitchen.