Several months after the U.S. Supreme Court's notorious 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London - which expanded the right of local governments to condemn property for private development - analysts at Golden's Independence Institute approached state lawmakers with an intriguing proposal.

As the institute's Jessica Peck Corry tells it, they sought to draft "model legislation that would guarantee that all individual property owners [facing eminent domain negotiations] would receive at least the assessed value of their property." But the idea was pooh-poohed because, in Corry's words, "we were told . . . fair market value never fell below assessed value."

Well, "never" has arrived. As the Rocky's Kevin Flynn reported this week, a down real estate market has found the Regional Transportation District making some eminent domain offers to land owners along its West Corridor light-rail line that "in some cases . . . are lower than the county assessors' values."

In one instance reported by Flynn, business partners Terry Smith and Robert Guy have been offered $160,000 for property that has been assessed at a value of $173,500. This is simply not right. Why should government be able to offer less for a property than the value on which that property owner is being taxed by government?

Under normal circumstances, most property owners who want to sell would wait out a depressed real estate market. They'd hold out for an improved economy where they might make a profit on the sale, or at least break even. But eminent domain procedures - despite regulations calling for offers of "fair market value" - leave sellers little choice about when their property is sold.

Corry is right: It's only common sense that those enduring a property condemnation at least be compensated at the level they're being taxed. That's why we're glad to learn that she and her colleagues at the institute are pursuing their model legislation that addresses this discrepancy. We hope fair-minded lawmakers will give it careful consideration and use it to craft and pass a law that will protect individual property owners.

One curious irony in all this is RTD's unwillingness to part with its own property at a loss. Again as reported by Flynn this week, RTD now has on its hands 315 acres of land it acquired in a failed real estate deal with Union Pacific Railroad. The transit agency doesn't need the land, and "voted Tuesday night to try to sell it off - but only if it can get back the total $18.2 million it paid."

RTD should be required to extend the same courtesy to those in the path of its West Corridor light-rail line.