A St. Louis County family that refused a $200,000 offer for its land has won its eminent domain fight and has been awarded more than ten times the original offer.
A circuit judge has awarded the family more than $2 million. The Novel family has owned the land for more than a century. The county offered $200,000 for it in 2010 because it wanted to build a highway through it.
The $800,000 of the judge’s award comes under a new “heritage value” law recently approved by the legislature, which lets people who’ve owned property for more than 50 years to get more money in eminent domain cases